The Customer
Landcom is the NSW Government’s property developer. A state-owned corporation, it designs and builds quality housing developments, designed to deliver social, environmental and economic benefits to the people of NSW
Landcom puts into practice the NSW Government’s plans for urban growth, adding value to strategic and complex residential projects, for both vacant land and established sites.
Now known as UrbanGrowth, Landcom changed its name in 2013, the organisation continues to play a key role in the NSW’s development. In 2011, it recorded revenue of $403m, generated more than 10,200 jobs from development activities and delivered close to 2,000 new dwellings.
AC3 [Klikon] has provided innovative information technology solutions to Landcom for more than 10 years. During this time, AC3 [Klikon] has acquired a comprehensive understanding of how information technology enables Landcom’s business and has become a valued and trusted technology partner.
The Challenge
As part of an information technology investment review, Landcom identified specific gaps and limitations within its existing infrastructure. It was decided to outsource the central hardware infrastructure to ensure that the business systems could continue to meet the needs of a growing organisation.
The objective was to focus business resources on the core business functions and find technology partners, who were able to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) skills and expertise that would complement the Landcom team.
Landcom’s real estate business is very cyclical and so flexibility and scalability to meet increased demand was a critical project objective.
The Solution
AC3 [Klikon] designed and built new server and storage infrastructure that utilised POP-diversity.
The server hardware was hardened and configured in a high-availability cluster to provide virtualised application delivery to Landcom’s clients Newly-deployed networking hardware linked branch offices and remote users For perimeter protection and to ensure secure connectivity, new firewalls were configured, hardened and deployed Mirroring the data-set was performed automatically between the primary and secondary sites To help meet the financial objectives of the project, AC3 [Klikon] retained ownership of the hardware and charged Landcom a fixed monthly fee for delivering the service.
The Results
Landcom is able to focus on delivering core services to its clients without the distraction and additional costs involved in owning and managing their own information system hardware.
“The Klikon team understood our business drivers and built a solution that met our objectives,” said Warren French, Group IT Manager.
With resilient infrastructure supporting the business, any risks that unplanned outages posed have been mitigated. The improved systems performance has boosted productivity with much faster task completion times.
The fixed monthly fee includes contingency fees for consulting and advanced training; this allows the Landcom team to draw upon extra skilled technical resources as needed.
Landcom regularly undertakes large capital-intensive projects and needs the ability to dynamically scale up and down its utilisation of technology. By being able to easily adjust additional services on a needs basis, Landcom now has greater agility and can adjust much faster to meet cyclical demands, without the need for any additional capital expenditure.