The problem

Around 80 per cent of the server estate in the Skipton IT Shared Service Centre is virtualised. Miskell says there would have been an extra cost of around £42,000 for deploying the capability required by HML from the incumbent vendor’s technology. Ongoing costs would also have risen as the solution was scaled up.

The benefits

Microsoft Partner risual has helped Skipton Building Society cut its licensing costs significantly and improve the time to market of new financial services based on a virtualised self-service development portal. By deploying Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center 2012, its IT Shared Service Centre has increased business agility and no longer relies on manual workload processes to develop server-based applications.

• Skipton gains agility with virtualisation and saves £42,000
By deploying the self-service portal project with Hyper-V and System Center 2012, Skipton has identified a lower cost alternative for its virtualisation strategy. It gives the business the agility it needs to keep pace with market demands.

The engagement with Microsoft Partner risual meant Skipton no longer had to spend £42,000 on a proof of concept and licensing.

• Making the best use of existing Microsoft licenses
Software licensing specialist risual showed Skipton how it will save money in the medium and long terms by making full use of its existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. Miskell says: “The Microsoft Software Developer Network licenses were part of our existing agreement, and ECI provided a scalable licensing model that didn’t increase costs as the project grew.”

• Skipton looks forward to lower management costs
In the medium term, Skipton will look to use the Virtual Machine Manager component of Microsoft System Center 2012 to manage the entire virtual machine estate. It has the ability to interoperate with non-Microsoft technologies to provide a single management point.

We took the view that with its latest releases of Microsoft System Center 2012, the Microsoft offering had matured significantly. But we still required peace of mind that the product would achieve the business goals we’d set out for the project.

David Miskell, Solutions Architect, Skipton IT Shared Service Centre

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