Louvolite

The Challenge

An ambitious growth roadmap in its sights and a mission to maintain its market-leading status, resulted in a pivotal moment of choice - to either continue investing in the current infrastructure or consider a total upgrade and move to cloud. Our experts worked with Louvolite on a business-wide consultancy piece, with in-depth discussions on public, private and hybrid cloud including full commercials for each option, and recommendations around how these could meet the company’s technology needs. This preparatory work gave the leadership confidence to adopt a cloud infrastructure that enables the business IT strategy of driving and sustaining profitable growth, inspiring employees, and guiding strategic business decisions.

Our Solution

Louvolite chose a private cloud model, thanks to its flexibility to support growth at no extra cost and the ability to meet the firm’s current and forecastable needs, including its journey along a strategic acquisition trail. A staged implementation aligned to a six-month migration roadmap saw Louvolite critical hardware replaced with a private cloud solution located in our own Tier 3 data centre in County Durham. Our colocation contract delivers a secure and fully redundant high speed communications network linking to Louvolite UK headquarters in Cheshire, and international locations. The design has been engineered to support full disaster recovery and business continuity, offering multiple levels of protection in the event of an interruption.

Our managed service gives Louvolite full access to our multi-disciplinary team of senior engineers, technical architects, and other specialists, who are on hand to support its highly experienced in-house IT team. The end-to-end service offers peace of mind spanning helpdesk, remote device monitoring, endpoint security, service and incident management, and detailed reporting. Our multi-skilled team in our Network Operations Centre (NOC) based at the data centre monitor the infrastructure to prevent problems arising, reacting fast to any issues.

The Outcome

Louvolite is confident that its business rests on a secure, highly cost-efficient colocation and communications network backed by a full managed service, which together deliver highly secure communications, better connectivity, and improved network security.

Our solution also gives the business flexible, unlimited storage options, plus scalability, and visible and predictable costs sitting alongside its expansion strategy.

Tom O’Connor, Chief Information Officer for the Louvolite Group, said:

“The people at ITPS are exceptionally technically capable and generous in sharing both their knowledge and their ideas. The managed service gives us access to a large and highly skilled team, which combined with our own in-house expertise has resulted in a collaborative and very successful approach to getting us to where we are now. 

Louvolite highly values its reputation for excellent customer service, and ITPS’s people-centered approach is a great fit for us. ITPS sought to understand how we make use of technology, going above and beyond to explore options and support our business.

There were bumps in the road, such as worldwide semiconductor shortages delaying equipment installations, we were grateful when the ITPS CTO Andy Hunter took the lead in offering us a flexible workaround, at no extra cost and with no interruption to the business.

Moving to cloud was a ’moon-landing’ for Louvolite. We are a company which prides itself in our ability to be self-sufficient and skilled in every aspect of our business, for instance we both design and manufacture in the UK over 90% of our product range.

Any concerns with ‘letting go of control’ were allayed by a smooth transfer from on-premises to cloud, with no degradation in performance, and features such as disaster recovery with 24/7 monitoring.

Along the way we also managed to acquire three diverse and excellent businesses, we look forward to working with ITPS to support our new colleagues. ITPS continues to support us on other key projects, such as O365 and Teams expansion, WiFi upgrade and cybersecurity training.

We trust their opinions and ideas and they guide us to the right solutions. Louvolite has a reputation for innovation and introducing product ‘firsts’ that disrupt the market! The cloud-centric agile, secure, scalable, and modern IT infrastructure we now have in place will help us to accelerate that mission.

When we were looking for a partner who was both small enough to genuinely care about our needs, and big enough to get the job done, ITPS’s name came up time after time.”

Tom O’Connor Louvolite | Chief Information Officer