Brennan deploys IaaS for surfwear retail chain

Managed services provider Brennan has deployed its infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) product for national surf shop City Beach.

The three year multi-million dollar deal sees Brennan host the company's ecommerce platform and provide City Beach with networking, maintenance and support services across 65 City Beach locations. 

Compared to an in-house solution, City Beach said it expected to save 30 percent on its total cost of ownership over three years with Brennan. 

City Beach wanted to build an e-commerce business in one hundred days.

"To host such a platform internally would mean building a data centre at our head office, hiring new staff and making a sizeable capital investment in hardware, said Paul Downs City Beach chief information officer.

"The case Brennan made for an IaaS offer was much more commercially compelling, outlining a raft of benefits in terms of performance, scalability, speed of deployment and cost."

Downs said the model offered "flexibility to adjust capacity, processing power, or storage to suit demand".

Brennan externally hosts the 14 environments required for the project on infrastructure based on VMware's virtualisation software and IBM's Websphere 4 web application server.

Stephen Sims, Brennan's general manager sales and marketing said the retailer represented a "substantial deal" for the service provider.

"One hundred days was an aggressive time frame," he said.

"The key thing is that it's a cloud based platform. In theory we have the equipment there and waiting.  That's why they chose us," he said. 

Brennan launched its IaaS product last June but had customers deployed on the platform 12 months prior to that.  

"I believe we are in a strong position to capitalise on the growing demand for cloud services as we can offer a complete solution unlike telcos who do not have the IT knowledge to provide the necessary support to help clients," Sims said.