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Intercept helped us meet the demand for a quick roll-out of our IT infrastructure in Australia. They did this with great professionalism, and got the project off the ground and running with minimal disruption to our day-to-day operations.
They really added value in terms of all the knowledge sharing, which we benefited from tremendously.
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Ian Lauwerys
Global IT Director
Kennedys Law
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The Customer
For any legal firm specialising in litigation and dispute resolution, protecting mission critical data is of the utmost importance. None more so than for one of the biggest names in the City of London. Kennedys is not only one of the main players in insurance and reinsurance dispute resolution, it also has an international reach with offices as far afield as Hong Kong and Sydney.
As litigation specialists, Kennedys is a global law firm headquartered in the City of London. In today’s 24/7 business environment Kennedys has been at the forefront of its sector in adopting new technologies to drive the partnership forward. This is certainly true with its adoption of virtualisation to improve its business agility enabling new services, and even open new overseas offices in the most cost effective way. .
The firm specialises in litigation and dispute resolution services for a broad range of industries including insurance, healthcare, construction and rail. With over 89 partners and over 500 staff worldwide, its legal experts work from five UK offices, and internationally from Madrid, Dubai, Hong Kong and Auckland, as well as a recently opened office in Sydney. The firm also has an active network of associated offices in Dublin, Karachi, Lisbon, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, Santiago, Dubai and Warsaw.
The Challenge
The IT team at Kennedys is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the firm’s lawyers and partners can access confidential case notes and business critical applications wherever they happen to be working around the world.
Ian Lauwerys, IT Director at Kennedys, stated: “All international IT operations require considerable co-ordination, supporting and monitoring. When our end users are leading figures in law - an industry that places special importance on trust - then the need to deliver on promises and meet high expectations becomes all-important,”
“Planning the opening of a new office in Sydney, Australia, required the deployment of fully integrated IT, but gave our technology team only a few months to deploy a solution,” he added.
The short time frame and long distance added complexity to the new office project. On the one hand, there was a need to ensure that consistent levels of support were available in Australia. On the other hand, setting up several new servers to tight deadlines and hiring IT contractors from the UK to travel with them was prohibitively expensive.
The Solution
Considering the complexity of the IT challenge, Ian decided to involve virtualisation specialist Intercept. Kennedys had worked previously with Intercept successfully installing its Citrix and back-office applications, Ian knew he could depend on their specialist advice and support. Ian said “I knew that Intercept could provide us with the expertise and skills to carry out the job efficiently and to the exacting standards that we demand. But it wasn’t just because of this that I went back to them. The fact is, Intercept always ‘come up trumps’ in terms of making a value-based decision as well as being proactive about knowledge sharing. Our IT team now has additional highly valuable skills.”
Intercept recommended VMware ESX for a scalable, easy-to-manage server farm, creating a virtual environment that removed the need for several physical servers.
The virtualisation project involved installing a number of applications in a UK test lab with each specialist application installed and tested in turn. The Kennedys IT team were then able to test the entire suite of integrated systems with specialist skills in the UK.
An image of each server was then copied to portable media and couriered to Australia. Installing these virtual servers onto the new system in Sydney simply involved transferring files to hardware prepared by a local IT service provider. Because the entire solution was installed ‘out of the box’, Kennedys high standard of quality and reliability were maintained throughout.
Removing Risk and Costs
The adoption of virtualisation technology has already resulted in huge cost savings by eliminating the need for local application expertise in Sydney. With no need to ship physical equipment, or send people with specialist skills - further savings were realised.
Ian Lauwerys continued: “Intercept’s advice and experience in installing our virtual environments contribute to our IT team’s continual professional development by sharing their expert knowledge. The consultancy services included empowering the Kennedys IT team to understand and take ownership of the virtualisation technologies employed,”
“Intercept helped us meet the demand for a quick roll-out of our IT infrastructure in Australia. They did this with great professionalism, and got the project off the ground and running with minimal disruption to our day-to-day operations. They really added value in terms of all the knowledge sharing, which we benefited from tremendously,” concluded Ian.
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CHALLENGE
- New office opening in Sydney, Australia.
- Tight deadlines to deploy new IT infrastructure.
- Sending UK contractors to Australia prohibitively expensive.
SOLUTION
- Virtualised Servers using VMware ESX.
- UK test lab created to build new Sydney infrastructure and test their applications.
- Kennedys server images couriered to Australia.
- Images copied to Sydney hardware by inexpensive local IT resources.
BENEFITS
- Huge project cost savings.
- Quick roll-out of infrastructure.
- Improved reliability as no physical equipment shipped.
- Reduced costs as no specialist staff were required in Sydney.
- Minimal disruption to our day-to-day operations.
- Added value in terms of all the knowledge sharing.
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I knew that Intercept could provide us with the expertise and skills to carry out the job efficiently and to the exacting standards that we demand.
The fact is, Intercept always ‘come up trumps’ in terms of making a value-based decision as well as being proactive about knowledge sharing. Our IT team now has additional highly valuable skills.
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Ian Lauwerys
Global IT Director
Kennedys Law
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