"We’ve grown and evolved our services with iomart and they’ve more than kept pace with our changing requirements."

The Kringle Candle Company (Europe) Ltd sells and distributes the famously fragrant Kringle candles throughout the UK and Europe. It is owned and managed by Richard Walkling and sells direct to thousands of customers as well as shops and other distributors.

Kringle Candle Company (Europe) has a fully managed service from iomart which includes: managed data centre and shared network security services; a managed cloud server; managed connectivity and managed backup. iomart provides 24/7/365 support.  iomart’s cloud platform enables Kringle Candle Company (Europe) to create and allocate RAM and storage as required.

Richard says, “iomart has been with us all the way, helping us to expand and grow.

“The complete package provided by iomart allows us to focus on our customers and our ecommerce software because all the hardware and operating systems are all taken care of.”

Aspidistra Software produces a unique ecommerce system integrated to the Sage range of accounting and business management software in the UK. It has over 120 customers in the UK and Ireland and runs over 150 distinct websites delivered in a number of different languages for a diverse range of industries.

Until 2011 Aspidistra leased a large server to provide shared hosting for its customers. However the business was growing quickly and needed a new solution that was more scalable and would allow different customers to consume more or less resources without impacting on each other.

Virtual Machines (VM) in a public cloud was selected as the technical solution and Aspidistra tested one VM from a shortlist of three suppliers.  It installed its software, tested the performance and evaluated the support from each supplier.  iomart came out top and an initial order was placed for 30 virtual machines.

Paul Dorey, co-owner of Aspidistra Software, explains, “Aspidistra wants to be in the software and services business and not the hardware and hosting business.  Cloud services allow us to deliver specific capabilities to our clients with having to worry about the detail of their provision.  We moved from the public to a private cloud because it is more cost effective and gives finer grained control on how we allocate resources.  We no longer tell our customers how big the resources we allocate to them are, we just tell them it is enough!”

iomart supplies all Aspidistra’s customer-facing hosting including cloud backup, disaster recovery and remote desktops.

"We now have a super-fast network that connects all our outlying offices with our headquarters, allows members quick access to our vast archive of horticultural information and images, protects their personal details and keeps us online 24 hours a day."

We’ve helped the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the world’s largest gardening charity with over 400,000 members, to create a secure, resilient and scalable IT infrastructure to meet the online demands of its growing global membership and its staff.

RHS turned to us after deciding its historic central London headquarters, the Royal Horticultural Halls in Vincent Square, Westminster, were no longer suitable to act as the charity’s data centre.

Robert Reilly, Head of IT for the Royal Horticultural Society, says, “We are a registered charity and rely on subscriptions, donations and sponsorship to fund our work, so how we deliver value back is hugely important. It was no longer economical for us to be using Vincent Square for our server hosting so we needed a new and efficient way of operating and managing our IT. iomart Hosting offered the world class, resilient, enterprise data centre facilities that we needed at a price we could afford.”

iomart Hosting used its expertise in providing highly available, high

performance VMware solutions and its Enterprise infrastructure to build a hybrid cloud platform for RHS in its secure London data centre.

The main RHS website which provides gardening advice, horticultural research and tickets to RHS events is supported by our CloudSure platform which allows capacity to be scaled easily and quickly in the event of spikes in traffic. The RHS’s internal systems sit on a large secure, private cloud.

“There were three specific things we needed to achieve with the move to iomart’ s data centre – UPS, connectivity and a high level of security. We now have a super-fast network that connects all our outlying offices with our headquarters, allows members quick access to our vast archive of horticultural information and images, protects their personal details and keeps us online 24 hours a day.”

"The iomart team invested a huge amount of time and effort to understand our business and the challenges we face, through regular site visits and assessment of our existing estate."

office2office (o2o) provides managed procurement and business services to the corporate, mid-market and public sectors, including the UK Government. o2o’s business service offering includes secure destruction and managed communication and logistics. The company, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange (OFF:LSE), employs almost 900 staff across the UK and Ireland. The o2o group brands include Truline, Banner Managed Communication plus Accord and Banner Business Services Limited, which was originally part of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO).

Originally o2o’s IT was focused around a single set of offices and one server room in Norwich – a legacy of its days as part of HMSO. However a series of acquisitions over the last few years saw it grow to such an extent that it accumulated offices at several different locations across the UK creating an IT environment that was extremely fragmented.

Vincent Cassidy, Group IT Director for o2o, explains: “As we made new acquisitions I knew we needed to reduce our risks and put in a scalable platform. Essentially we needed to evolve from a traditional IT department that was just keeping the lights on, to a flexible IT infrastructure that added value for our customers, enabled us to adopt more modern technological processes and allowed flexibility for future growth.”

“It was important to us that o2o would be treated as a very important customer and that was where iomart Hosting absolutely stood out. The iomart team invested a huge amount of time and effort to understand our business and the challenges we face, through regular site visits and assessment of our existing estate. This meant that when it came to the proposal they could address our specific requirements in detail. It really set iomart Hosting apart from other potential service providers.”

A large migration was undertaken which involved moving over 200 servers into iomart’s London data centre. The resulting group-wide virtualisation has vastly reduced o2o’s server hardware. There is a large VMware platform with built in backup, which provides the group’s DNS services, Active Directory plus SAN storage.

There are also two dedicated database servers – an MSSQL Cluster and MSSQL Mirror. “It was quite a complex migration but it was a smooth and comfortable process,” Vincent Cassidy says. “The support we’ve had from iomart Hosting has been excellent .The technical staff have been very responsive, superb in fact.”

"This round the clock support fits in completely with our global presence. Our IT teams can contact the data centre night or day wherever they are around the world."

Misys plc (FTSE: MSY.L) is a global market leader delivering application software and services for banking, treasury and capital markets. Employing more than 4,000 people, the company serves 1,300 customers in over 120 countries, including all of the world’s top 50 banks.

Misys has been consolidating its various UK offices into one central efficient corporate headquarters in Paddington, London. The company reviewed its hosting services and decided to create an exclusive relationship with a sole supplier, iomart Hosting. iomart Hosting’s London data centre has in essence become Misys’ European data centre.

Phil Davies, Director IS for Misys UK & EMEA, explains: “We operate on the basis of a ‘one-Misys’ culture and the decision to go with a single direct provider of hosting is another symbol of that ethos. We already had a relationship with iomart Hosting and were impressed. The decision to use them as our sole host has proved the right one. As soon as the relationship was formalised, the benefits were tangible. There was an immediate improvement in the stability of our equipment and complete engagement with our business objectives.”

iomart Hosting supports a fully virtualised platform including Netapp for SAN, with an internal private cloud. This platform hosts all of the Misys HR, finance and business intelligence functions, plus the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning for the UK and EMEA.

Phil Davies explains: “The benefits of virtualisation and our private cloud go hand-in-hand. It has massively reduced not only our physical footprint but also the associated costs. It gives us greater agility and flexibility, allowing us to be much more responsive to demands for change in the IT infrastructure as the business grows and adapts to what our customers want. We use enterprise-class hardware which feeds through to high availability and recoverability. Our whole critical IT structure is safeguarded by the controls and security that iomart Hosting has in place.”

"iomart Hosting could provide us with the cloud architecture we needed along with a much more personal service."

New Brand Vision Group is a digital media agency based in the area known as Silicon Roundabout, the east London district that has become an entrepreneurial hub for tech companies in the UK. Clients benefiting from its brand, web, SEO and marketing campaign expertise include City and corporate organisations, global technology and engineering companies, universities plus consumer brands and charities.

When it was launched over a decade ago, New Brand Vision Group relied on a physical IT infrastructure which worked pretty well. However, the company decided that it wanted to change that fixed approach and move to the flexibility of cloud hosting.

“It’s important as a digital agency to be thinking ahead about the latest trends and tactics,” explains Ben Harris, Founder and Managing Director. “We felt this approach needed to be extended to our hosting as well. We knew the cloud was becoming more popular and after doing some research we realised it could be of huge benefit both to our customers and our own business.”

For this, New Brand Vision Group needed a new hosting company and iomart Hosting was selected to deliver the company’s goals.

“We felt that iomart Hosting could provide us with the cloud architecture we needed along with a much more personal service,” explains Ben.

“We now have a very reactive platform which benefits both the agency and our clients. Many of the PR and marketing campaigns that we do for clients can result in hundreds of thousands of hits on their websites,” Ben says, “so we have to be ready for substantial increases in traffic. For a small campaign we can assign a new virtual server very quickly, while for larger campaigns that need a load-balanced server it’s much quicker but also much cheaper to roll one out.”

New Brand Vision Group has a range of virtual machines sitting on iomart Hosting’s CloudSure infrastructure. Every new client the agency takes on is provided with a new virtual machine which iomart Hosting deploys for them using a VM template which is then customised to sit behind a fully managed dedicated firewall.

"Skyscanner is a technology-focused business and our service is reliant on the stability of our datacentre equipment. iomart Hosting's datacentre team has a no-nonsense, can-do attitude to support."

Skyscanner is Europe’s leading travel search website, specialising in cheap flights and deals on over 600 airlines, as well as prices for car hire and hotels.

Visits to the Skyscanner website have increased massively year on year and to cope with this huge and ever-growing demand for its service, Skyscanner required first class IT Infrastructure support to assist it aggressive growth.

Craig Parker, Director of IT at Skyscanner, explains: “It’s vital that the Skyscanner flight search engine is always available because people are accessing it from many different countries at all times of the day and night. iomart Hosting’s facilities have allowed us to scale up as fast as possible, while still allowing us to serve our millions of customers in a professional, responsive and personal manner.”

Skyscanner’s cloud platform is housed in iomart Hosting’s data centres, where entire floors are provisioned with high power racks in cold aisle containment with dual A+B feeds to each rack.

Skyscanner is focused on rapid expansion in existing and new markets with the objective of becoming the number one flight search engine in the world.

Phil Dalbeck concludes, “Skyscanner is a technology-focused business and our service is reliant on the stability of our datacentre equipment. iomart’s datacentre team has a no-nonsense, can-do attitude to support which takes away the pain of day to day hardware maintenance allowing us to focus on the bigger picture. Working with a hosting partner prepared to work with us in deploying such cutting-edge technology is vital to our success.”

"iomart Hosting is a best in class provider and a natural delivery partner for Decibel Technology clients."

Decibel Technology, a leading software specialist for web development and website management, has partnered with iomart Hosting to provide website owners with a secure and resilient hosting platform, with extra value ‘pay what you use’ services, all at the click of a button.

Built on a highly scalable cloud infrastructure from iomart Hosting, Decibel Technology’s managed service gives businesses of all sizes simple ‘point and click’ provisioning of a hosting account and are billed only for what resource they have used and when.

The managed hosting service also provides ‘burstable’ resource on demand for occasions when extra power is needed, for example at peak holiday booking times or the Christmas retail season. Decibel hosting is not only economically advantageous but also mitigates the risk of not having bought enough resource, which can often reduce website performance.

“Decibel’s managed hosting is designed simply to put our customers in full control of their website, to ensure it is operating at all times at optimum performance,” said Ben Harris, CEO, Decibel Technology.

“The Decibel Technology hosting solution through iomart Hosting is a highly resilient, secure and scalable solution run on an industry leading platform. Customers are provided with 24/7 monitoring and management and a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). We provide our clients with dedicated monitoring, charts of server usage and email updates of any minor or significant changes.”

"By utilising iomart Hosting's disaster recovery facilities, the learndirect team can fully concentrate on delivery to their learners without worrying about uptime and service interruptions."

learndirect provides online training to more than 240,000 individuals each year as well as businesses across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. learndirect has its own in-house operations and service delivery teams to manage the technology and the platforms on which courses are delivered.

iomart Hosting is providing s providing a fully managed colocation service for learndirect’s operators Ufi Ltd, to deliver Disaster Recovery for its main IT services.

Fiona Benoist, technology services manager for learndirect said:” We needed a disaster recovery facility that could meet our requirements for continuity of service, accessibility, security, environmental considerations and best practice. Iomart Hosting came out on top. Our aim is to ensure that our learners can access their learning around the clock when they need to.”

Fiona Benoist added:” Since 2000 we have used technology to enable more than 2.65 million adults to gain the skills they, their employers and the economy need, helping them on their way into further training or employment. Having the security of this disaster recovery provision means we can continue to harness the web and reach millions more as the need for skills becomes increasingly important.”

"The platform allows us to have the flexibility we need for our future plans and iomart's proactive support ensures we have the systems expertise to hand as the business expands."

The Drum is the flagship marketing and digital journal from the Carnyx Group, a leading independent communications company specialising in serving the creative, architecture and legal communities.

The Drum is using iomart Hosting’s CloudSure platform to ensure a highly available online presence and iomart’s EMC® Avamar® platform to deliver enterprise Cloud Backup.

Nick Creed, Digital Director of The Drum, said: “The Drum has expanded rapidly over the last 24 months with a huge increase in traffic to the site. Moving our hosting to iomart’s CloudSure platform has ensured we can continue to expand with the confidence we have the infrastructure that will be able to expand with us. The platform allows us to have the flexibility we need for our future plans and iomart’s proactive support ensures we have the systems expertise to hand as the business expands.”

One of the main benefits of using CloudSure is that customers can manage their billing, spin up virtualised servers and manage power and bandwidth, all from one easy-to-use Cloud Control Panel.

Headquartered in Glasgow, The Drum is expanding rapidly across the UK in addition to gaining a growing international audience. The Drum’s website has over 340,000 unique visitors every month and is rising.

"iomart Hosting ensures that the website can deal with the battering it takes at times like this when there are huge fluctuations in interest."

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is a charitable trust that inspires social change by publishing the latest research into social issues, poverty and ageing in the UK in order to influence social and economic policy in the UK. All of the research carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is published and then archived through its main website.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation publishes around 100 reports a year online, most of which are between 20 and 30,000 words long. Every July it releases its most influential report ‘A Minimum Income Standard for the UK’ which needs to be accessed quickly and securely by thousands of journalists, academics, MPs and other opinion-formers.

“In order to fulfil our business objectives we use our websites as our primary dissemination and communication channels,” states Dan Clarkson, Web Officer for Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “It’s vital that our websites offer the best user experience and therefore the hosting of them, which is often seen as the forgotten part of a website package, is of critical importance to us.”

JRF uses iomart hosting to support an increasingly diverse digital portfolio. Round-the-clock customer support and key account management are vital to the relationship.

Dan says, “I can’t speak highly enough of iomart Hosting. It offers a stand-out service, bending over backwards to make sure we get the service we need. It doesn’t matter what the technical question is, whether it’s one about hosting which its technical staff are supposed to know about, or specific computer programming issues which they’re not, iomart Hosting always come up with the right answer and solution.”

"When I rang up the hosting company we were using in California they couldn't even find my details. Thankfully iomart Hosting have come to the rescue so the website won't crash again."

Entrepreneur Blair Bowman set up World Whisky Day after realising there was no designated day to celebrate the iconic spirit. He set up a website, and asked people to post their events and messages, but such was the success and publicity that the concept generated that it crashed under the weight of interest from supporters across the globe.

More than 20,000 people registered to attend one of more than 200 whisky events held in 30+ countries as far afield as Kuala Lumpur to New Zealand and Alaska to Argentina.

The site was hosted on a shared hosting platform with a well-known US based hosting provider and the service left a lot to be desired.

Blair Bowman explained: “When I rang up the hosting company we were using in California they couldn’t even find my details. They said it would take 48 hours to fix and I said it can’t because it’s World Whisky Day today! I ended up manually inputting hundreds of events myself. Thankfully iomart has come to the rescue with their CloudSure platform ensuring that the website won’t crash again.

“The CloudSure platform offers dedicated cloud resources and is specifically architected to cope with spikes in traffic so it is perfect for a one off high profile event such as World Whisky Day. And just as importantly I know that there are technicians on hand constantly monitoring its performance every minute of the day.”

"Users of Questionmark's European On Demand service want to know that their data is stored securely and that the data centre in which it is hosted is fully resilient and meets data regulations in the UK and Europe."

Connecticut based Questionmark, is one of the world’s leading providers of assessment management technologies.

The company required a private cloud infrastructure with dedicated network firewall to ensure data integrity for its European OnDemand customers and iomart Hosting was selected.

Eric Shepherd, CEO of Questionmark said: “Questionmark’s European assessment cloud reflects our commitment to meeting the needs of our many European and global customers for whom compliance with EU data privacy and security directives is paramount.

Questionmark’s customers deliver high-stakes tests and certification exams and they simply cannot compromise on the availability, reliability and security of their assessment management. They rely on Questionmark to provide 24 by 7 service, global support, service continuity, measures that target 100% uptime and a decades-long track record of providing trustable results to clients worldwide and we selected iomart as they share those same high standards.”

The company’s European-based OnDemand service complements Questionmark’s existing OnDemand services, which have been available globally for several years in compliance with the US-EU Safe Harbor program via a US-based Cybertrust-certified, SSAE 16 audited datacentre.

iomart Hosting’s data centres are ISO: 27001 and ISO: 9001 accredited and fully compliant with the relevant requirements of PCI DSS v1.2. They have full intrusion protection and fully disclosed technical staff and are operational round-the-clock 365 days a year.

“We are seeing an increasing number of customers opting for OnDemand as opposed to deploying our technologies on-premise — and the reasons extend beyond the speed and ease of deployment,” Eric Shepherd continued. “On-premise deployment requires more than the initial investments in server and network hardware, both of which depreciate over time; it also entails constant monitoring, daily backups, patching and updates that can be staff-intensive and costly. Customers are increasingly looking to OnDemand as a secure, reliable and more cost-effective alternative.”

"The transition to iomart was very smooth.. We experienced no downtime or problems during implementation."

QA Software develops information management solutions for the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC), Utilities and Oil & Gas industries. The Software as a Service industry leader has worked on thousands of projects world-wide and its UK office in London is supported by a strong research and development team and a network of international resellers throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. The project data QA Software hosts for clients’ projects is mission critical to the company and its partners.

QA Software wanted to move from its existing hosting provider because its platform was coming to the end of its life. The successful and growing company needed a fully upgraded and more powerful solution combining speed of application and SQL data base, resilience and capacity, with disaster recovery. QA Software went to market and picked iomart for the mix of managed and colocation services it needed based on a combination of cost, flexibility, 100% uptime and proximity.

Brian Dodsworth, Managing Director of QA Software, says, “iomart was the obvious choice for us. They were very competitive on price, the technical support and sales teams absolutely understood our requirements and iomart’s London data centre was ideally located for our needs. The flexible service level agreement meant we could use the service efficiently and it has resulted in a significant cost saving. We believe we will have saved in excess of £30,000 by switching our hosting to iomart over the initial three years of our contract.”

The full upgrade, redesign and migration of the QA Software platform was completed in four weeks.

As a result of the move to iomart QA Software has been able to concentrate on delivering the highest quality document control services via the Cloud to customers around the world.