Major International Research Resource gets Ingenious IT Clarity

Emerald Group Publishing is a leading independent publisher of global research impacting business, society, public policy and education. It turned to fellow Yorkshire Company, Claritas Solutions, to provide IT systems which would allow and cater for its international growth.

There was also a need to support its key role of delivering major functional enhancements, in addition to provide IT expertise for the extended ‘in-house’ development team.

Based in the UK and with operations in the US, China, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Japan, Australia, Canada, Poland, Taiwan, Czech Republic and Dubai, access to its online material is sought by policy makers, business, public bodies and educationalists worldwide.

Emerald’s journals and collections have a subscription from more than 3000 university libraries worldwide and 95 of the world’s top 100 business schools subscribe to Emerald titles, in addition to many leading corporations, governments and public bodies.

A subscription based web portal, ensures that information can be accessed whenever required by customers and its web service facilitates an average of 2 million downloads per month. To meet Emerald’s business and budget objectives Claritas created a specialised solution, incorporating the best quality components into a single service, allowing both companies the ability to manage all aspects of the current system and for planned growth.

Claritas created a fully project managed, dual data centre which provided the proficiency to ensure the success of the task, controlled risks, and delivered 100% reliability. The new system has also provided security and support 24/7. The ongoing contract is in the region of 1 million over 5 years.

Over the last five years, Emerald usage and downloads grew by 80% to the current 2M per month.

Claritas has, with its expertise and holistic experience, been able to provide a system to ensure this high performance is maintained. This combined with full design, development and support of the e-commerce application and infrastructure, as well as a complete domain provision and its management secured, means that Claritas has fully delivered.

Brian McDermott, Chief Technical Officer, Emerald Group:

“The enormous benefits of working with the many facets of Claritas Solutions means that we are able to develop and operate our websites, reduce IT management risk and provide unrivalled value for money. We are now engaged on a programme of strategic development projects where Claritas will contribute expertise and resources to supplement Emerald’s in-house team.”

The Claritas Support team proactively monitor the system and work closely with Emerald to install new application releases without affecting customer service delivery or uptime. Its current projects for Emerald has meant a current investment of over 12 months and, because IT projects are always evolving, likely to be ongoing to ensure all systems keep up.

The success of the well planned, managed implementation and seamless migration of the new system has led to further strategic initiatives between the two companies including redevelopment of the website and a new infrastructure to support global operations.

Kevin Edwards Sales Director, Claritas Solutions said:

“We have built a strong partnership with Emerald over the past 5 years, working to ensure their client facing web services are more accessible, scalable and reliable, and to give a dependable platform from which to lead their industry sector. “