Co-operatives E-Store, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Co-operative Group, trading as The Co-operative Electrical and offering a wide range of electrical products online, has selected hosted IT systems.  

Co-operatives E-Store, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Co-operative Group, trading as The Co-operative Electrical and offering a wide range of electrical products online, has selected hosted IT systems.

The E-Store needed to replace its existing servers, which were approaching the end of their viable lifecycle. As it was already using enterprise resource planning (ERP) and e-commerce systems from multichannel retail and distribution software provider, Maginus it decided to also take on its hosted IT solution. The provider said this will provide robust hosting that is fully managed, with a secure back-up and, if required, fast accurate recovery.

Diane Porter, Co-operatives E-Store head of operations said: "We decided that utilising the Maginus Hosted IT solution would perfectly fulfil our current requirements and provide future capacity for expansion. The variable bandwidth availability that this solution offers us is also beneficial in allowing us to cope with seasonal sales peaks.

"We work with Maginus as the provider of our business management ERP system, and as we enjoy an excellent relationship with them in this regard, and the Hosted IT solution they offered clearly fitted our needs; selecting Maginus was a logical decision."

Maginus will also be providing Co-operatives E-Store with a managed service, looking after all its hardware requirements. This will mean that Maginus looks after all the challenges of IT, enabling the subsidiary to concentrate on its business. This service will include security, patching, back ups, performance monitoring and tuning, pro-active maintenance and issues management.

This will allow Co-operatives E-Store to replace its old hardware and move to new technology with no capital outlay. The company will also benefit from technology investment in the future, as Maginus runs a continuous hardware replacement cycle.

Porter added: "The flexibility of the system will be a driver for allowing future developments to be progressed efficiently and simply. It was important that the deployment met with our ethical values and principles. Cost savings will come from the reduced investment in new technology, a reduction in management time and overhead costs, but critically, our energy consumption will also decrease by using modern, greener technology. On the new platform we'll be 40-50% more energy efficient, which will be a great result."

The project has already commenced, and the transfer of the current hosting to Maginus will be completed by mid August 2009.

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