Fountains

Fountains was originally established as a forestry management operation in South West England in 1957 trading under the name of Fountain Forestry. The forestry management base grew substantially during the 1970s with further operations in England, Wales and Scotland.

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Through new contract wins, the company has built upon its traditional core services to offer all of its customers a more complete approach through a framework of consultancy, project management and technical delivery skills. Over the years it became evident that customers constantly seek efficiencies to compete in their own core markets, procuring more services through a reduced number of suppliers. To support this, Fountains offers customers a model of a single source, managed services provider.

The Challenges

Fountains operates out of 20 offices and depots nationwide, from Exeter to Inverness, and its headquarters (HQ) is based in Banbury, Oxfordshire. With such widely distributed satellite offices, Fountains needed a network solution that would connect them all to the HQ and thereby enable coordinated control of the entire operation.

Fountains wanted a solution that was scalable and would grow with them but the existing system was unable to support this expansion. What's more, if there was ever any network downtime in Banbury, not only could this be costly to the company in terms of lost productivity, all of the additional sites would not be able to access the files, emails or accounts until the network was fixed and the problem was solved.

The Solution

With the multiple types of traffic co-existing on the same MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) network, the solution enables more efficient management and monitoring of traffic, faster restoration after a failure and higher performance. Also, eliminating the need for firewalls at each satellite office removed another point of failure and increased the
stability of the network.

The Result

Employees can now benefit from working at home and cut down on the time dedicated to travelling from location to location and the UK offces can better communicate with the US office via video conference calls (VCC). This has not only reduced associated travel costs, but has also reduced the organisation's carbon footprint - which was increasing due to the amount of commuting previously required.

Darren Williams, IT Co-ordinator at Fountains, commented: "Following rigorous due diligence and reviews of different suppliers, Claranet came highly recommended and was the supplier of choice for this project. Right from the start they were approachable and accommodating, listening to our requirements and answering any questions we had. They always responded positively, constantly looking for new and innovative ways to deliver a cost-effective solution that could grow with the organisation."