Brennan wins five year, $5m contract

The contract, valued at about $1 million a year, requires Brennan to provide Northline with a hosted managed service, including servers, a national private network linking all Northline offices and telecommunications infrastructure that allows for portable personalised numbers and videoconferencing.

Northline CEO Craige Whitton, said the new technology infrastructure, backed by fully redundant Brennan IT data centres in Sydney and Brisbane, would allow the company to deploy the latest release software without any disruption.

According to Whitton, the overhauled IT infrastructure would equip Northline to manage its business in a new way. “First of all, it allows us to serve our customers better,” and he added, “it provides more streamlined communications within the business and out to our customers.” Whitton also said the infrastructure overhaul also gives Northline more mobility at work, with every employee having their own portable phone number, “so no matter where they are located within our national operations, our customers can get hold of them.”

“This enhanced mobility also allows our guys to sit in front of a customer, log in to our system, enter notes and let customers see what’s happening on their account. This real-time access to our business systems makes it easier for our people to make faster decisions and provide better service to our customers.  This hosted infrastructure also gives us a much more stable and future-proof platform. It allows us to plug-and-play any type of software and hardware that helps deliver better service to our customers or to grow the business from an operational perspective.”

Brennan – a privately-owned company which providing fully managed and secured IT, telecommunications and cloud-based solutions to mid-sized businesses across Australia and New Zealand –  has signed a deal with Northline which is backed by a service level agreement with 99.99 per cent uptime.

Under the agreement, Brennan is providing Northline with an entirely new Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform and national private Internet Protocol (IP) network. Based on Microsoft Windows Server 2010 software running on tier one server hardware, it replaces Northline’s 16 ageing servers which were running Windows Server 2003.

The staged implementation started with hosting in July, followed by telephony in August/September, with the final stages including on-line presence and videoconferencing, due before the end of this month.