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| Capital & Regional selects Foundry's ServerIron technology Foundry Networks, Inc. has announced that Capital & Regional, a co-investing property asset manager with ?6.5 billion worth of property under its management, has installed ServerIron 850 Series switch technology to provide application switching and traffic management capabilities for the business. This is of fundamental importance to Capital & Regional as it locates the majority of its core business systems centrally at a co-location centre in East London operated by Interxion with its various UK businesses then linking to access them. Capital & Regional uses its own funds and typically enters into joint venture partnerships with City institutions to create property funds and then actively manage and develop the property in which it holds a significant stake. The company's operation covers five key divisions: The Mall in-town shopping centres comprising 23 sites; The Junction out of town retail parks including 15 sites; 18 Xscape urban entertainment complexes including 3 SNO.zone indoor ski slopes; 36 Fix UK trade parks which provide goods and services primarily to the building trade; and a portfolio of 44 German 'big box' hypermarkets and retail parks. A key differentiator for the company is that it builds best in class specialist management teams to then run the retail and leisure sites it operates – for example, the chief executive of the X-Leisure division is PY Gerbeau, widely regarded as the man who helped 'fix' Euro Disney and turn the Millennium Dome into a successful UK visitor attraction. The business is entrepreneurial and has been hugely successful, with property under its management growing from under ?500 million in 1996 to ?6.5 billion today. And the number of people visiting Capital & Regional owned and operated sites is vast. Some 53.6 million people shopped at The Junction last year and, with 10 per cent of the UK in town shopping market, The Mall attracts nearly 5 million shopper visits per week to 2, 100 retail units. In 2006, Xscape complexes hosted 30 million visitors, with Xscape Castleford, along with the London Eye, named joint number one paid for UK attraction in a 2005 survey carried out by VisitBritain. The ServerIron 850 technology is crucial to the success of the SNO.zone operation. Stephane Vernoux, Capital & Regional's product development manager, says: "All the SNO.zone business goes through the Foundry switch as the core systems reside in Interxion." This means that staff at the various sites use web-based tills which interact with two fully integrated core e-commerce systems, X-Book, a bespoke booking and ticketing system, and X-Sales, an EPOS system used in the bars, restaurants, ski rental shops and so on. These LINUX-based applications link to clustered Oracle 10g high performance data bases (Oracle RAC) and Dell EMC SANs based at Interxion, with the ServerIron switch load balancing these applications to ensure availability and complete reliability – without it the business simply could not function or take revenue. The impact of failure is huge given the SNO.zone centres are open 364 days a year from 6.30am to well past midnight and ?15 million of revenue is taken over the technology from the three sites combined. As part of the SNO.zone roll out and its approach to deploying best of breed technology, Capital & Regional has installed an Avaya VoIP solution at each of the three SNO.zone centres which combine together to create one virtual contact centre. With a strong focus on customer service, this means that a person telephoning to book a skiing session in Milton Keynes may end up talking to some-one in Braehead based on operator availability or skill sets required. The heart of the contact centre and call management system is in Milton Keynes linked by leased lines to Interxion, with the ServerIron 850 switch technology load balancing voice traffic accordingly using MPLS. Capital & Regional derives a significant proportion of its revenue from rents paid by the companies located at its retail and leisure sites. It uses a market leading off the shelf property management and accounting system, Estate Computer Systems, to manage this. The application sits at Capital & Regional's London HQ and is accessed using Citrix by the different businesses, via Interxion with the ServerIron technology again providing the load balancing. Similarly, to manage its infrastructure effectively and provide increased security, various virtual LANs have been created based on traffic type with the ServerIron technology managing traffic too. The ServerIron 850 technology was purchased through Dell Financial Services with Foundry providing support to the IT team directly and KSR delivering managed risk support services at the Interxion co-location centre. The centralised approach to technology deployment, focus on best of breed suppliers with tried and tested IT then rolled out uniformly across the business means that, given the size of the company, Capital & Regional has been able to keep its IT costs aggressively low. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Networking News :: home page |