Adapt to house Steinhoff IT infrastructure

The Adapt solution delivers continuous services to Steinhoff UK Retail’s portfolio of 550 retail outlets and 11 warehouses, as well as to its call centre and 2 Head Offices. Shortly after signing with Europe’s second largest furniture and bedding retailer, Adapt has worked to extremely tight timescales, delivering a production-ready scalable web hosting service to support seasonal high demand on Harveys’ online furniture store and a virtual infrastructure for the testing of a key business application for Bensons for Beds.

Operating in such a dynamic, global market, Steinhoff’s business is subject to constant change. As such, the company must ensure enough flexibility within its vertically integrated supply chain in order to keep up with sudden changes within the business environment, while keeping costs low. Following a full market review and a bid process, Adapt was selected to provide managed hosting and networking services to its core office sites and a fully integrated first line helpdesk for Steinhoff UK Retail’s in-store personnel. Notably, Adapt’s award-winning enterprise Virtual Data Centre (eVDC) was also chosen for its ability to support Steinhoff UK Retail’s growth with resilient, affordable services that would deliver effective disaster recovery capabilities and optimise Steinhoff UK Retail’s existing infrastructure.

Initially, Adapt worked with Steinhoff UK Retail to quickly migrate the IT systems for Harveys and Bensons for Beds into the hosted environment, which provides a dual site solution for both staging and disaster recovery. It was also immediately tasked with creating a virtual environment for one of Bensons for Beds’ warehouse distribution products, which Adapt completed in just a fortnight in readiness for comprehensive pre-launch testing. During the Christmas period, Steinhoff also required Adapt to build and host infrastructure for Harveys’ website to increase bandwidth to support significant peaks in traffic.

Since signing, Adapt’s burstable infrastructure and bandwidth has successfully supported Steinhoff UK Retail’s entire IT infrastructure, managing the seasonal surges throughout the year particularly during two of their peak trading times at Easter and Christmas. The two companies are also working together to build an infrastructure and network that will support further expected surges in trading for both Harveys and Bensons.

Talking about the migration of the Harveys website, Mark Spicer, Head of IT at Harveys said “It was critical to get this system up and running as soon as possible without any downtime as this would be our first undertaking under the new agreement. Adapt has certainly delivered on this, offering a creative solution with the extreme flexibility required to cope with sudden expected and unexpected peaks in demand.”

Steinhoff UK Retail benefits from Adapt’s innovative Service Pod model – a focused technical centre of excellence that takes ownership of Steinhoff UK Retail’s IT environment and acts as an extension of its business. This approach gives Steinhoff 24x7 access to their virtual team or ‘Service Pod’, comprising technical experts with knowledge of all key IT areas of Steinhoff UK Retail’s environment. Each Pod is fronted by a Service Delivery Manager and ensures a high-quality, accurate response to any service issues and a strong degree of problem ownership. “The key thing here was that the team building the solution (the Pod) became the team that then supported us when we transitioned into early life support and then BAU. This allowed the transition to become seamless. To migrate an estate the size of ours in less than three months was always going to be a challenge, but it was a challenge that Adapt met” explains Spicer.

“Adapt certainly hit the ground running, requiring very little time to understand our specific requirements before designing a bespoke service that would precisely meet those needs,” said Steve Webster, Head of IT at Bensons for Beds. “Our business is extremely fast-paced - and with our significant online presence, we cannot afford any downtime or service outages. We needed to find a supplier that could deliver a resilient service with proven disaster recovery capabilities. Not only has Adapt delivered an exceptionally robust solution with its dual data centre solution, its underlying support network and strong service delivery model has made Adapt a valuable strategic partner that offers expert technical advice tailored to our business roadmap”

“This is a perfect example of the continuous competitive edge that a private cloud environment can offer businesses in the fast-paced, dynamic retail industry – not just at busy periods such as Christmas,” said Simon Fisk, Sales and Marketing Director at Adapt. “It is testament to Adapt’s dedication to providing a reliable and secure environment that we are able to win business with organisations like Steinhoff UK Retail. We are confident that as we continue to work with Steinhoff UK Retail, we will develop further solutions tailored to its specific needs and look forward to working more closely with the company as the project continues.”