Practical Law Company
Not everything is rosy in the IT department, but we are in a much better position than we were three years ago, says Niels Montanana, technology director at the Practical Law Company, as he contemplates moving its infrastructure into a managed services environment.
The legal publisher has experienced a seismic shift in technology practices in the past six years, largely because 80 per cent of its revenue now comes from online services, whereas previously it was a traditional paper publishing business.
The IT team has expanded from eight employees to more than 30, reflecting the increasing reliance on technology both internally and for clients. And, as IT has matured, so have working practices.
‘The early web sites we developed were looked after by a couple of developers and myself,’ says Montanana. ‘We ticked along with ad hoc development practices. Structured programming techniques and test procedures were not in our thinking.’
A typical software development path would be ‘a small exercise in what was required, which would be hammered out fast and loose. and chopped and changed’, he says.
The upside to such an approach was that it got things running quickly, but the downside was problems with the ability to scale, says Montanana.
As the business grew, so did the demands of clients, who expected more stability and did not want systems to be unavailable at weekends.
He says the company hit the limits of technology using Microsoft scripting languages and the SQL Server database, and switched to the Oracle 9i database and Java development.
‘We were nervous because all of us were unfamiliar with Oracle and Java,’ says Montanana.
After building an IT team with a core of Java developers who work on web site projects, Montanana has also sharpened development techniques.
‘We now follow big software house practices, with proper development techniques, documentation and testing,’ he says.
Deploying separate test and production environments leading to less risk ‘is all part of the growing up exercise, and gives us the ability to punch above our weight’, he adds.
The company now has several new services in the pipeline, including a legal risk service.
Aiming for new audiences also means scaling up.
‘Last year we looked at scalability, and decided to move our infrastructure into a managed services environment,’ he says.
Practical Law chose NTT Verio UK after considering proposals from four providers.
‘NTT was the best fit, offering a primary site run out of the UK and a disaster recovery site in western Europe, for true 24x7 availability,’ says Montanana.
Supplier Network Centric Consultants will help with an Oracle 10g database. Also planned is Sarvega XML accelerators and Network Appliance storage devices. ‘We will use best of breed and are moving completely away from the “roll your own” mentality,’ says Montanana.
But the transition is as nerve- racking as the earlier transition from Microsoft to Oracle.
‘Then we were buying a new database and putting something on it that worked for the business. Now we are doing something new with the infrastructure, but we have the drive to make sure it works,’ he says.
Kemira GrowHow UK
Bill Hulley, information systems manager at Kemira GrowHow UK, is cultivating a business-oriented IT strategy at the company, which provides agricultural fertiliser products to UK farmers.
‘The focus is on delivering what the business needs: controlling fixed costs while maintaining service levels,’ he says.
The company uses Oracle’s E-Business Suite, which includes the core Oracle financial functions already in use, plus additional applications such as order management and customer relationship management.
‘We wanted the flexibility offered by the web world, but making savings on licences was also a big driver,’ says Hulley.
‘Small businesses are always trying to maintain services while keeping control of people and resources.’
An 18-month project, completed last year, integrated the firm’s accounts payable and finance applications with its sales system.
‘Before, the two systems were split across two server rooms. Maintaining separate interfaces added no value,’ says Hulley.
Resilience has also improved by having all the software on one cluster of servers, with both servers capable of running the database and the applications.
HP ServiceGuard software monitors and switches operations within the cluster if a server dies, while Oracle’s DataGuard software trickles online data to a standby database in a second computer room.
With this backup in place, Hulley was confident enough to cancel the company’s disaster recovery contract.
‘We have resilience in the cluster and the backup database, so if operations fail we can get them up and running in a few hours,’ he says.
Hulley hopes to speed up future IT projects by moving towards standard packages and away from bespoke systems.
‘The challenge for small businesses is in re-engineering business processes,’ he says. ‘It often seems easier to say: “Make the system fit what we do”. But the problem is that a bespoke system, such as our sales order processing system, can grow into a bit of a monster, which you have to maintain continuously.’
Hulley also wants to invest in training people. ‘The difficulty for small businesses is finding time to train IT employees and maintaining morale when budgets are being squeezed,’ he says.
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