UK Based, Global Operation Delivers 24 x 7 Research Information

Customer Profile

• Company: Emerald Group Publishing
• Industry: Publisher of business and management research
• Location: UK, with operations in the US, China, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Canada, Poland and Dubai
• Employees: 200+

“Working with Claritas Solutions extends Emerald’s ability to develop and operate our mission critical websites, reduces IT management risks and provides us with excellent value for money. We are now engaged on a number of strategic development projects where Claritas Solutions can contribute expertise and resources to supplement Emerald’s in-house team”
Brian McDermott, CTO, Emerald Group

Emerald is the world’s leading publisher of management research. Access to their materials is provided via a subscription based web portal, ensuring that information can be accessed whenever it is required by customers. The success of this service can be appreciated from the following:

• More than 3000 university libraries worldwide subscribe to Emerald journal collections
• Emerald journals and collections are purchased by many leading corporations, governments and public bodies
• 98 of the world’s top 100 business schools subscribe to Emerald titles
• The Emerald web service facilitates an average 2 million downloads per month

The Challenge

As Emerald’s growth extended their global operations it was paramount that they moved to a highly reliable and resilient solution with 24x7 operational support. There was also a need to extend the ‘in-house’ development team who would play a key role in the delivery of major functional enhancements.

The Solution

Claritas approached the marketplace with a view to sourcing the best possible partnerships to support Emerald’s business requirements and future growth plans.

Following an independent review of all Tier 1 providers, Claritas were able to recommend the solutions that represented the best possible business and budgetary fit. Importantly however, Claritas were able to incorporate these ‘best of breed’ components into a single service contract for Emerald. Full responsibility for the continuity of service would be with Claritas and Emerald would resultantly benefit from a single point of engagement that could manage all aspects of their system.

The key components of the solution are:

• Full design, development and support of the Emerald ecommerce application and infrastructure
• Fully managed, dual data centre with complete failover / resilience strategies to ensure 100% reliability
• Domain provisioning and management
• All aspects of system security provided for (both
  perimeter and content)
• A high performance solution to cope with current
  download volumes and future expansion
• Additional IT resource to be available to the Emerald
  team as required
• 24x7 Support services

The success of this project was not only a result of Claritas being able to fullfill the above areas, but also our ability to understand the Emerald business to ensure that the solutions deployed fully supported and enabled business objectives.

It was also paramount that the resultant implementation was fully project managed to guarantee success and control risks. Claritas met and, in some areas, exceeded these requirements.

The Benefits

With the implementation of a more resilient system (continuity of service being guaranteed by a 100% Service Level Agreement), Emerald are able to benefit from improved uptime and ease of management.

With the deployment of a fully managed solution, the Claritas Support team are able to proactively monitor the system and work closely with Emerald to resolve any issues. This relationship also enables the Emerald team to deploy new releases of their applications without impacting customer service delivery or downtime.

Due to the success of the implementation being delivered through a well planned, project managed and seamless migration, the relationship between Claritas and Emerald has progressed to additional strategic initiatives including Website re-development and global operations infrastructure.

Why Claritas Solutions

Claritas Solutions have a wealth of experience that has been accumulated over the years and a ‘knowledge bank’ that has been amassed by its long serving, specialist staff that is unrivalled. Claritas Solutions are therefore able to interpret each client’s individual needs and produce tailored solutions that are the highest percentage fit and the most commercially advantageous. Claritas Solutions establish long term, strategic relationships with customers through which we are able to work jointly in implementing solutions that provide demonstrable, competitive advantage. The goal is to use proven technology to support and enhance business objectives.

We have built a strong partnership with Emerald over the past 5 years. In this time we have assisted them with making their client facing web services more accessible, scalable and reliable ensuring that they have the platform for leading their industry sector. We look forward to the partnership continuing to prosper for many years to come”
Kevin Edwards, Sales Director, Claritas Solutions