Kingfisher Plc, is Europe’s leading home improvement retail group and the third largest in the world, with over 800 stores in eight countries in Europe and Asia. Its main retail brands are B&Q, Castorama, Brico Dépôt and Screwfix.
Scalable Communications is delivering a Service Level Agreement (SLA) across the entire B&Q network, which comprises of 330 stores, and 25 other sites, including data centres, office buildings, distribution centres and trusted partners. Prior to the contract being awarded, Scalable designed and built the network, as well as acted as the design authority across the whole network.
The KITS distributed data centre is spread over two sites connected over an Extreme Networks 10 Gigabit Ware Division Multiplexing service. Hundreds of servers are spread over the facility, providing a very large SAP environment over which Kingfisher’s operations are run. This is a 24hour mission critical operation, supporting transactional data during the day and stock replenishment, amongst other activities, during the night.
“We have been working with Scalable Communications for over ten years now, across a variety of projects. It is essential for us to trust such an important part of our business to a company who has consistently delivered projects on time and to budget” says KITS Group Networks Manager, Richard Pooley. “We believe Scalable is the company to work with and have awarded the three year contract as a result of this.”
“Throughout our relationship with KITS we have advised on and implemented only the best in class technology for their network. The Extreme Networks solution has, and continues to provide a reliable network, enabling all the Kingfisher operating companies to be virtually hosted on a dual core solution; reducing cost, carbon footprint and simplifying the management of the network for the KITS team.” said Scalable Communications Managing Director Simon Brown. “Building strong relationships and delivering consistently high quality work is how our business has consistently grown and we are delighted Kingfisher trusts us to work in this way”, “Our team is onsite on a weekly basis, working closely with the KITS team and to ensure all of the systems are running smoothly.”