UMBRO:

MANAGED HOSTING & MONITORING

UMBRO is a globally recognised brand with a strong heritage derived from more than 70 years' association with football. Focusing on the design, sourcing and marketing of football-related apparel, footwear and equipment, UMBRO’s relationships with leading teams and professional clubs now encompass exclusive endorsements and distribution rights worldwide in over 90 countries. UMBRO also currently supplies playing and training kit to the England National Team.

THE CHALLENGE

Prior to the commencement of the 2006 World Cup, global brand UMBRO had devised a strategy to enhance its online presence and improve communications with licensees worldwide: the implementation of a suite of multiple b2b and public-facing websites to better serve key stakeholder groups. The existing UMBRO portal at the time was hosted at a third party co-location facility whose downtime was becoming increasingly frequent. UMBRO therefore had to address the key issues of structure and stability that would be particularly critical for the new sites, intended to provide UMBRO licensees and smaller retailers worldwide with critical corporate information.

As the go-live deadline for the new websites drew closer, UMBRO was looking for a technology partner who could provide a complete managed service with full performance monitoring in addition to strong connectivity and proven resilience skills. It was also considered key for this partner to have extensive IBM System i experience for potential future development and the ability to provide variable bandwidth on demand to cope with spikes in usage over the World Cup period.

THE SOLUTION

Working closely together during the initial phases of the project provided detailed insight into UMBRO’s motivations and expectations, which in turn proved invaluable in meeting the tight deadlines to which the project was bound. ACS hosts UMBRO’s public-facing retail and b2b websites, including www.umbro.com and www.umbroonline.co.uk.

The UMBRO architecture is built for stability and entails load balancing of multiple servers for scalability and system resilience, leaving UMBRO free to focus on its core business: developing its product portfolio, retail network and brand.

The solution is deployed on highly available IBM hardware (System i and System x) running Windows and Linux and includes the provision of private communications links, on-demand Internet bandwidth, data centre facilities, and specialist ad hoc consultancy. Positioned between the developers and live sites, ACS was well-placed to facilitate change management and provide independent feedback on site development as it progressed, monitoring bandwidth statistics and providing real- time reporting to UMBRO for evaluation purposes.

Danny Healey, IT Operations Manager at UMBRO, adds:

“In ACS, we feel that we’ve not only selected a safe pair of hands to manage our systems, but we’ve also picked a technology partner who will support our future innovation. The offering stood out above the rest, meeting and exceeding our technical requirements and demonstrating a very positive corporate culture. We are already seeing the benefits of detailed online analysis, enabling us to make key web site improvements and enhance the end-user experience.”