Site integration and outstanding service for Innova UK

The company was established by a team of experienced partners and as their services span a range of technologies, the team already had strong links into the industry. However, they felt that their existing connectivity and WAN suppliers were too prescriptive and just weren’t delivering the quality of service Innova UK envisioned for its customers.

Innova UK decided to run a project with Backbone Connect that would serve as a testbed for future collaboration.

The challenge

One of Innova UK’s clients, a national commercial property consultancy, had a requirement to add nine new sites from acquisition to its existing WAN infrastructure.

The nine sites were located across the UK, including London, Exeter and Liverpool. Each had specific requirements; there were a variety of timelines and providers to deal with across the project. Most problematic was the timescale: it was quite tight and the majority of work would be scheduled at the end of the year over the Christmas and New Year period, when it can be difficult to get providers to guarantee timeframes.

Enva selected Backbone to provide the WAN that would enable Enva to bring its four business units together and, at the same time, reduce the overall cost of its network.

The solution 

All nine of the client sites were brought online according to schedule. This included the provision of new Ethernet connectivity to some sites and additional datacentre rackspace.

“Backbone exceeded our expectations. There are lots of risk factors that come into the equation: ECCs and construction work and dealing with the big carriers and their timeframes. Backbone have dealt with it all really well; they never said it wasn’t their issue. They’ve always helped us resolve anything that came up as soon as they can.”

Sam Clark, Account Manager at Backbone, says: “Innova UK were frustrated by their existing carrier’s intransigence; they were rigid, unresponsive and unhelpful. By contrast, we offered a level of integrity that I know the Innova UK team appreciate. This project would dictate how the rest of our relationship would develop, so I’m pleased they’ve had such a positive experience. It’s a successful basis from which we can continue to collaborate and seek new opportunities to work together.”

The result

•  Integration of 9 new sites with existing WAN infrastructure.
• Firewall and security service with 8X8 telephony, switches and colocated firewalls.
• 4G connectivity with fibre, broadband and wireless access.

Innova UK are now working with the same end client to migrate the existing 24 site estate across to Backbone as well. They’ve also introduced a number of smaller clients to the Backbone team, and the team is happy to have found a new connectivity partner that matches its own expectations in terms of the service it wants to deliver to its customers.