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Case Study

Supporting over 50% of the UK’s Premier League football clubs and approximately 9,000 EPOS devices in over 60 locations, Verteda needed a partner who could deliver a robust, stable cloud platform they could rely on to accelerate deployment, generate more revenue, and increase customer confidence.

Delivering uninterrupted service at major events

“In a restaurant environment that’s operating seven days a week, if a terminal fails it’s an issue but not a catastrophe,” says Matthew Prosser, Director of Business Development at Verteda. “But if our food and beverage systems aren’t working at half-time at a football game or during the interval in a music event, it’s a major problem. It just cannot happen.”

Supporting customers across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East, Verteda provides innovative, hosted IT solutions for sporting, entertainment, and hospitality venues —

C24 ensures operational stability for Verteda’s hospitality platform Hosted services solution built on HPE BladeSystem and 3PAR storage

ObjectiveDeploy a stable customer-centric, hospitality platform to enhance guest satisfaction, increase workforce productivity, and maximize profitability

ApproachLeverage C24’s Tier 4 accredited hosting services built on HPE BladeSystem and 3PAR storage technologies to ensure operational stability for sporting and hospitality events

IT Matters• 50% reduction in deployment times

• 99.999% availability in a robust, hosted private cloud environment

• Integrated analytics into hospitality platform

Business Matters• 2X revenue increase over two years

• Over 1,000,000 interactions with sports and music fans per week

• Increased credibility in global market place

• Reduced IT costs for Verteda customers

Page 2Case study Verteda

Industry Service Provider

“Because of the partnership we’ve put together with C24 and HPE, we have a best-of-breed platform and our credibility in the global market place has increased. We’re more agile when it comes to making business decisions and winning new contracts that have very short lead times, with the result that we’ve doubled our revenue over the last two years.”

— Matthew Prosser, Director of Business Development at Verteda

including hotels, resorts, restaurants, and food services. Verteda’s unique hospitality platform—Vision—streamlines operations to enhance guest satisfaction, increase workforce productivity, and maximize profitability. The end-to-end, customer-centric platform includes workforce management, complete food and beverage operational management, point-of-sale (static, mobile, and online), payments (cashless, contactless, online, and queue busting), inventory and procurement, stock control, and business intelligence with real-time reporting.

“60% of our business is within the sporting arena where venues often have no more than 20-25 events per year, but on match day the system has to work,” states Prosser emphatically. “There’s no excuse for failure. Our applications have to run without interruption, so it’s critical that we work with a knowledgeable partner and a hosting environment built on a robust hardware platform that can deliver the operational stability that our customers and their clients expect.”

Choosing the right partner

“At Verteda we are always looking at ways to improve customer service and wanted to reduce the number of support calls coming in from our customers running our software on-premises or in 3rd party data centers,” states Prosser. “Upgrades were an issue in terms of the impact they had on the scheduling and operational side of the business. I also wanted to differentiate Verteda from the competition by helping our customers leverage their data to enhance the customer experience and increase revenue generation by creating a single version of the truth.”

Verteda chose to partner with C24 Ltd.—a Six Degrees Group company and winner of the 2016 European Cloud Above and Beyond Awards. C24 is a specialist in EPOS (Electronic Point Of Sale or tills) and hospitality application hosting and analytics. C24 partners with EPOS vendors to take their solution from an on-premises, hardware-based solution to a cloud-enabled, agile service hosted in C24’s accredited Tier 4 data centers.

“Verteda recognized quite early on that they

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Industry Service Provider

needed to integrate enhanced business reporting into their platform, and we had a solution that worked for them,” says Lee Duffield, Business Intelligence Lead and Partner Manager at C24. “They also realized that by running all of the applications in a hosted private cloud, they could eliminate data silos and create the single version of the truth that their customers were looking for. A hosted environment also offered accelerated deployment, scalability, and streamlined maintenance that they could never achieve with an on-premises or 3rd party hosted solution.”

Delivering the right capabilities

“As a Tier 4 accredited service provider, we need to meet extremely aggressive service level agreements (SLAs),” adds Dave Ricketts, Head of Sales and Marketing at C24. “For us to deliver the rock solid solution that customers like Verteda need, it’s important that we partner with a leading, trustworthy infrastructure vendor that can deliver a robust platform and is committed to supporting the same SLAs as us.”

“With HPE there’s a definite difference in the quality of the components, the system build, and the support compared to other vendors,” continues Ricketts. “We’ve always used HPE equipment in our data centers, and over the years our experience has generated confidence in the HPE brand. We aim for 99.999% availability and we usually achieve it.”

When Verteda started planning to migrate their clients from on-premises or Tier 3 hosted environments, C24 built a highly-available private cloud with no single-point-of-failure using HPE BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures populated with HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Server Blades, and HPE 3PAR StoreServ storage systems connected to HPE for remote 24x7 monitoring. C24 subscribes to HPE Proactive Care for preemptive support to address any potential issues that might affect availability.

“We knew that we wanted a private cloud built on highly-available, robust infrastructure; we had an existing relationship with C24; and we knew what they did was of a very high standard,” says Prosser. “We wanted to give them the opportunity to prove themselves and they’ve done that every day since we gave them the first bit of hosting business.”

Designed for uninterrupted availability and stability

“With end users beginning to expect more sophisticated services, we recognized that we needed to make changes to support our customers,” says Prosser. “That meant partnering with someone who could offer higher levels of hosting together with the knowledge and skills needed to support more complex environments. Today, most of our clients have migrated to our private cloud running on C24’s HPE infrastructure, allowing us to support approximately 9,000 EPOS devices in over 60 iconic venue locations.”

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Case study Verteda

Industry Service Provider

“Partnering with C24 also takes the pain associated with maintenance away from the customer and reduces their overall costs,” continues Prosser. “They look after all of the upgrades and patching of the HPE infrastructure. The result is higher consistency, a lot less support calls, and incredible uptime that meets the needs of our customers—especially for the big events.”

“Running our private cloud on HPE infrastructure managed by C24 means that I’ve never had to deal with a client complaint about being unable to connect to their applications,” adds Prosser. That’s probably the biggest stand-out benefit of working with C24 and HPE. That makes my life easier—much, much easier.”

Enabling customer innovation for an enhanced user experience

“The solution has really made a difference, especially in the sporting sector where our applications often lie dormant for two—or even three—weeks,” adds Prosser. “Then—all of a sudden—all of those applications and equipment burst into life and are used at incredibly high levels of intensity. Workforces need to be managed. Food services supported with logistical and payment services. Fans wanting to bypass queues are preordering their food and drink and using a number of different methods to pay for it. And on top of that you have venues that want to incorporate match day stats and push that out to fans. Operational stability is key to supporting that level of customer engagement, and C24 and HPE hasn’t let us down.”

“We support, on average, over 1,000,000 fan transactions per week across some of the world’s most iconic arenas, and that’s only been made possible by having an incredibly stable platform,” says Prosser. “It’s also enabled our customers to change their business model and increase revenue. When fans find the same level of digital services in a sporting or entertainment venue as they do in the High Street, it engenders loyalty and they spend more money. The combination of a hosted environment coupled with the analytics and business intelligence has really elevated us further as a market leader.”

Realizing the vision and driving business growth

“Working with C24 as a Tier 4 service provider has allowed us to win high-profile customers and reduce deployment time by 50%,” says Prosser. “Six years ago, installing 1,000 EPOS devices in a venue would challenge us in terms of how we’d plan for that. But now it’s totally the opposite. Recently we installed 200 terminals at a Premier League venue in a week and a half during a three-week break in the season. There were clear-cut deadlines to meet and huge risk on the part of the football club, but we were able to do it with time to spare.”

Prosser sums it up: “Because of the partnership we’ve put together with C24 and HPE, we have a best-of-breed platform and our credibility in the global market place has increased. We’re more agile when it comes to making business decisions and winning new contracts that have very short lead times, with the result that we’ve doubled our revenue over the last two years.”

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Customer at a glanceApplication• C24’s private cloud built on HPE

BladeSystem and 3PAR technology allows Verteda to support over 1,000,000 fan transactions every week on match day and at entertainment events.

Hardware• HPE BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures

• HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Server Blades

• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 and 8200 Storage

Software• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and

2012 R2 with Hyper-V

HPE Services• HPE Proactive Care

© 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HPE shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

xxNW, August 2016

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