Partner Article

GÉANT’s infrastructure safe under Imerja’s watchful eye

Bolton-based IT solutions provider, Imerja, has delivered a technical first line service desk for GÉANT’s award-winning pan-European network, which interconnects Europe’s national networking organisations. GÉANT is Europe’s leading collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education. A major part of the organisation’s work is to plan, procure and build international high-speed networks.

Following a competitive tender exercise, Imerja won a three-year contract for the provision of a fully managed 24x7 technical service desk and monitoring services.

Highlighting the importance of service reliability to its users, Mark Johnston, chief network operations officer at GÉANT, commented: “Research and Educational users are demanding; they expect the services that we deliver and support to be always available and perform flawlessly. Infrastructure, supplier and user generated incidents must be professionally managed and resolved effectively and accurately every time 24 hours a day.”

Imerja is responsible for predicting, responding and solving any network incidents reported by GÉANT’susers, vendors or suppliers. The service is delivered through the Imerja Secure Operations Centre (ISOC) at its Bolton headquarters.

Ian Jackson, managing director at Imerja said: “This contract win underlines our expertise and reliability when it comes to proactive monitoring of critical infrastructure.

“GÉANT’s network connects over 50 million users at 10,000 institutions across Europe, and reaches 100 countries worldwide, so this type of responsibility demands a certain level of resilience and performance—our team has immersed itself in the infrastructure and is able to adapt to the changing demands of its unique environment on a daily basis.”

Since going live in October 2014, following a rapid transition and on-boarding of each member organisation across EMEA, the service desk has exceeded the challenging 95% service thresholds set by GÉANT. Tony Barber, head of GÉANT operations centre added: “The Service Desk delivery has been really positive and we have seen procedural adoption as well as common sense being used where there is variation. We are incredibly grateful for Imerja’s hard work and diligence.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Marie Jude .