The Brewery
Enterprise class, high availability, reliable, robust and scalable Infrastructure for cutting-edge venue.
London City based The Brewery venue, located near The Barbican Centre and the creative hub of Shoreditch, is a unique conference arena. Its sheer size and variety of spaces allows it to host meetings and events for as few as 30 attendees or as many as 1200.
The Brewery venue hosts a wide variety of notable events and conferences to the business sector, from blue chip clients staging internal company meetings to events such as the Football League awards, the London Web Summit and for technology giants Google and Facebook.
Faultless IT communications expected at all times
The Brewery is one of our first customers, we have always maintained an open and transparent partnership with a commitment to providing expert and independent advice to them. The technology infrastructure at the Brewery was ageing and working to full capacity. It was becoming more apparent significant financial investment was required to meet and exceed growing business demands.
One of The Brewery’s USPs is its ability to harness technology enabling events to run seamlessly and it was imperative excellence in this area was maintained. Scooping ‘best event venue’ at the London venue awards 2015 and ‘event venue of the year’ at the Event awards 2015 its reputation was vital to The Brewery’s success.
"We are winning a significant amount of new clients from the technology sector who are assured of the quality of internet and Wi-Fi connectivity they can expect to receive at our venue at all times, this also helps them in increasing their ticket sales for ticketed events. Panoptics understand this promise and delivered under budget, on time and exceeded our expectations."
The Challenge
The Brewery’s existing Infrastructure platform had worked adequately delivering their operational requirements for the last 5 years but it was becoming clearer it wasn’t going to be fit for purpose as the business grew. An aged infrastructure and hardware couldn’t be upgraded without significant financial outlay and project time to do so. The appropriate licensing required to upgrade networking and other functions were costly and would only be sufficient for a further 18 months.
The technical environment of the Brewery also needs to have flexibility, allowing spaces to be linked together or used in isolation suitable for individual capacity requirements of every event. Some events may be closed, for instance an annual internal staff kick off meeting where privacy is paramount or they may be open, requiring heavy social media traffic and online sharing externally.
A cost effective, robust solution was required with minimum impact on day to day operations to the business allowing for the growth of the business over the next 10 years plus.
The Process
Panoptics researched and provided a cost analysis comparison for increasing onsite systems accounting for all associated costs versus utilising Panoptics Cloud based Hosted Virtual Machines. We consulted with The Brewery, explaining and advising in detail all available options.
We were able to demonstrate a cost saving over 3 years plus the avoidance of a large Capex bill within the first year. This enabled The Brewery to make the right investment decision for them with supporting documents for their board.
We migrated their systems onto our cloud platform with no interruption to services and additionally provide robust Back-Up and Disaster Recovery for the environment as well as scalable capacity for their immediate and future requirements.
The Results
The Brewery now has an enterprise class, high availability, reliable, robust and scalable Infrastructure. This was confirmed when a significant outage was caused when a third party carrier cut through a fibre circuit, within just a few hours we restored the entire infrastructure with no loss of data.
The Benefits
The Brewery saved unexpected capital expenditure this year (in excess of £30K) and has clear costs calculated and mapped out for future budgetary control. The Brewery’s IT infrastructure has been upgraded to perform business operational requirements for the next 10 years with zero downtime, along with a 10% reduction on associated operating costs.