e-procurement company hailed as the ‘eBay for Business’ invests in managed utility computing to prepare for expansion
ProcServe, a leading provider of virtual marketplaces for business procurement and a wholly owned business of PA Consulting Group, has signed a three year, £1.7 million contract to support its customer base and international growth expansion plans.
The deal with SAVVIS, a global leader in IT infrastructure services for business and government applications, will support the delivery of ProcServe’s e-procurement solution as an on-demand SaaS (Software as a Service) for customers such as the government’s Zanzibar project.
ProcServe’s hosted purchasing solutions provide organisations and the government with customised unified procurement systems across different divisions. The front-end of ProcServe’s solution provides a simpler user interface along the lines of eBay and Amazon, in order to provide users with a familiar user experience. It can be used by employees at every level of the business, encouraging them to make purchases through the correct channels. For example, teachers at over 600 UK schools are currently using the system.
SAVVIS was selected to manage a utility computing solution for the core applications behind ProcServe’s e-procurement solution. SAVVIS’ utility computing solutions apply virtualisation technologies to provide customers with application platforms that deliver better performance, higher availability and lower total cost than found with traditional service provider models.
As ProcServe is growing quickly, the ability to scale up to meet customer demand can be addressed using the utility model to ensure that the vendor-neutral purchase to pay interface can deliver transactions and set-up trading partners quickly and securely.
With a large government customer base, security is one of ProcServe’s highest priorities, along with reliability and responsiveness for its 24/7 SaaS offering. SAVVIS will provide a highly redundant and mirrored dual-site business continuity solution, backed up with SLAs within its accredited ISO 27001 data centres.
“Unlike SAVVIS, ProcServe is not an IT infrastructure specialist and we don’t want to be. Rather than investing money and time employing an in-house team to manage our IT infrastructure, it made sense for us to leave it to the experts so we could concentrate on our specialist business offering,” said Veera Johnson, CEO for ProcServe. “Choosing SAVVIS wasn’t just about the solution it brought to the table, we chose the team because we saw that we could work well together. It feels more like a partnership than a business deal.”
“ProcServe is a new and growing company, so the utility computing model really suits our needs,” said Jesper Lynge Petersen, Head of IT Development at ProcServe. “We don’t want to know about how many servers we will need for future capacity, we just want to be billed for what we use now. As we provide flexibility for our customers, in turn we need our data capacity to be flexible too. SAVVIS understood our SaaS business needs and could deploy integrated managed hosting and network solutions to support our business continuity and global expansion plans.”
“To date, ProcServe’s solution has made a real impact on the government departments it has worked with and it has the potential to really alter business purchasing models in many industries, said Richard Warley, International Managing Director of SAVVIS. “SAVVIS has experience in the public sector, which gives us a real understanding of ProcServe’s business needs. The utility computing solution we will manage for ProcServe is designed to provide the scalability, reliability and security it needs to expand its international outreach.”
NOTES TO EDITORS
About ProcServe
ProcServe, a wholly owned subsidiary of PA Consulting Group, provides fast, flexible and secure electronic marketplaces and trading connectivity solutions. ProcServe’s hosted, custom-branded solutions provide customers with the unique ability to leverage a software-as-a-service solution and maintain their own uniquely branded and configured marketplace. Customers enjoy a faster solution set up, lower cost of maintenance, and a secure environment. ProcServe delivers Zanzibar and OPEN on behalf of the UK Public Sector. For more information, please visit www.procserve.com.
About SAVVIS
SAVVIS, Inc. (NASDAQ:SVVS) is a global leader in IT infrastructure services for business applications. With an IT services platform spanning North America, Europe, and Asia, SAVVIS leads the industry in delivering secure, reliable and scalable hosting, network and application services. These solutions enable customers to focus on their core business while SAVVIS ensures the quality of their IT systems and operations. SAVVIS’ strategic approach combines virtualisation technology, a global network and 29 data centres and automated management and provisioning systems. For more information about SAVVIS, visit: www.savvis.co.uk or www.savvis.net
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SAVVIS
Elizabeth Shumacker
Marketing Manager EMEA
+44(0)20
7400 5609
elizabeth.shumacker@savvis.net