Development, Integration and Hosting
Client Story: Virgin Atlantic Airways
Unlike many hosting companies, DSC has extensive software development and systems administration experience as well as a top-tier data centre hosting facility. This allows us to offer highly customised hosting solutions to cater to specific needs of our customers. Additionally, our development capabilities mean we can customise and integrate our hosted applications in a way that a traditional hosting company cannot offer.
Virgin Atlantic Airways came to DSC with requirements for a fully hosted e-mail system. With thousands of staff throughout the world, working around the clock, e-mail is an absolutely critical component of their corporate communications infrastructure. They needed a solution which would be reliable, even when accessed from remote locations, some of which might not have the luxury of high speed dedicated Internet access. Virgin undertook an extensive evaluation of a number of e-mail products and hosting options. They then enlisted the help of a third party company that specialises in performance testing, in order to evaluate the performance of the webmail component from locations around the globe.
Once the detailed analysis of the company's measurements had been compiled, it was clear that the performance of a DSC-hosted solution was significantly better than any of the alternatives.
Hosting was only part of the story however. Virgin wanted their e-mail system to fully integrated with their existing corporate intranet, both in terms of provisioning of user accounts, user authentication, mailing lists and so on. They gave DSC a detailed brief of their requirements and we created all the additional software components to facilitate them; automating feeds of data and integrating with their existing systems.
DSC even managed the migration from their old system. The whole process was completed on time and on budget. DSC continues to host the system, which is constantly growing as the airline continues to expand. A sophisticated arrangement of clustered servers, monitored and managed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by DSC's skilled engineers, has proven to be very reliable. Virgin have enjoyed 100% availability of their system over the two years it has been in use, thanks to our careful design of the network infrastructure and application hosting architecture.
If your project needs hosting which extends beyond the typical "mass market" hosting offered by most providers, speak to DSC today about how we can help.
