Condor Ferries has outsourced its business intelligence and collaboration services to a co-location datacentre.
Hosting company C4L will manage the company's Sharepoint,email,finance and business intelligence capabilities.
David Plested,head of IT for the Condor Group,said the company made the decision to avoid an expensive upfront upgrade to its own datacentre facilities.
The company's IT strategy is to put applications in the cloud and use software-as-a-service(SaaS)wherever possible,said Plested.
Condor moved its reservation system into the cloud 12 months ago.
He said the operating costs would be on a par with previous expenditure,but would also give the company's eight-strong IT team more time to mine business intelligence data.
"By using C4L's co-location services we can ensure a secure and resilient location for our IT,without having to manage the upkeep of our own datacentre.This in turn frees up more of our time to expand our IT capabilities,"he said.
"C4L hit the mark–on price it was the cheapest,and it has local facilities up the road,"he said.The internet connection was more robust than the one previously used in the ferry company's head office,he added.
