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Boohoo

Boohoo is one of the worlds leading online fashion retailers with 13 brands and over £1.5Bn turnover.

Inspired Networks provides infrastructure and software architectural consultancy across a wide range of platforms and systems including high volume order pipelines and international supply chains.

Drakes Plumbing

Drakes is a major supplier to the Plumbing and Heating trade in the South East of England.  They required a new telephony platform which would increase flexibility and reliability while at the same time as reducing costs.  With 7 branches spread around the South East they were paying to maintain 7 individual PBXes.  This was proving an inflexible and expensive model to run.

Inspired Networks designed and implemented a central PBX environment which enabled Drakes to drastically reduce their telephony costs.  For resilience Drakes have two virtual PBX, the primary based at head office and a secondary at one of their larger branches.  This meant they went from maintaining several systems down to two and removed the cost of calls between branches and head office.

One of Drakes flexibility requirements was the ability to open new branches efficiently and quickly.  With the central design it has meant that Drakes can quickly open additional branches without having to add to the cost of their telephone environment. Additionally, if any branches are closed due to power outages or disasters, calls can be automatically routed to head office rather than go unanswered.

Infrastructure technologies in use within Drakes include: Virtual telephony 

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Covers

Covers have supplied a diverse range of timber and building materials to a wide spectrum of customers for over 160 years. They have thirteen branch locations spread across the South of England with the head office in Chichester.

We were approached by Covers after a recommendation from Ridgeons, another builders and timber merchant in East Anglia. Both companies used the same ERP system, BisTrack, which we are familiar with having aided the supplier of it with performance issues in the past.

Inspired Networks implemented a resilient virtual platform in a campus configuration, supported by dual Fibre Channel and Ethernet rings, joining 4 buildings on the main site. This enabled the components of the platform to be placed in two widely spaced buildings for resilience and business continuity.

The new virtual platform supports the ERP and supporting systems, including a large terminal services farm (11 servers) which supports thin clients used as tills in all the branches