Calyx Wins €3.5M NI Colleges Deal

 Colleges Northern Ireland Signs A One-Stop-Shop Deal With Calyx

 

Colleges Northern Ireland has signed a  four-year contract with Calyx worth €3.5 million which will provide CNI, the representative body for six regional Colleges in Northern Ireland, with managed services and a technology refresh across 47 College campuses.

 

 

CNI acts as the central point for further and higher education and lifelong learning issues in Northern Ireland. It went to market looking for a single provider with the knowledge and experience to become a one-stop shop by bringing two different managed services together under one roof.

 

 

Calyx had to beat stiff competition to win the contract.The IT specialist was selected by CNI to be the single provider to six educational facilities with wide-ranging and complex requirements.

Services range from centrally hosted applications to on-site systems, all wrapped in a fully managed service. Part of the contract was a hardware refresh and a move to a virtualised server platform in a centralised data centre.

 

 

Calyx had already been responsible for the ERP piece of the service, but this deal means it now steps up to run the entire environment.

 

 

Calyx Group Head of Enterprise Sales Andrew Miller said: "This deal is one of our most significant in Northern Ireland, highlighting how the breadth and scope of Calyx enables us to become trusted partners to organisations with diverse and complex needs".

 

"We look forward to continuing to work closely with the Colleges in Northern Ireland, helping them get the best out of an evolving IT estate," said Miller.

 

 

"Having just one service provider makes it much simpler for the Colleges in Northern Ireland. Our job is to manage the multiple suppliers, optimise the environment, and deliver the best possible service back to the CNI," said Miller.

 

 

Miller puts Calyx's  success down to the breadth of its proposal, combined with  the firm's ability to meet strict UK Government procurement guidelines around ISO standards, information security, best-practice IT management and value for money.

 

Southern Regional College Director, Brian Doran, who headed up the project board for the colleges, said: "This is an important contract for the Colleges. It brings together a number of core services and delivers significant cost savings for each member college. This ‘one-stop shop' brings together the handling of student data, Human Resources, Estates and Financial Management.

 

"It also demonstrates that when we work together the colleges can achieve not just significant savings but also secure very high levels of service agreement."

 

 

At the core of the Calyx solution is a cutting-edge delivery platform, a combination of Citrix Xen Desktop and VMware vSphere in a virtualized data centre that hosts Agresso, the college's business-critical ERP system and New Dell Servers  A SAN solution for the primary and disaster recovery site will also be deployed.

 

 

Calyx will also manage the existing infrastructure that runs the local HR, administration and critical student applications. Support and Service Level Agreements were important components of the deal, with Calyx providing a single helpdesk for all aspects of the service, managed services and break/fix contracts for every site.

 

 

CNI Chief Executive John D'Arcy added: "Colleges Northern Ireland, as the contracting authority, worked closely with all six Colleges to ensure that we could put together a contract for services that was able to meet their needs. We are delighted that Calyx worked with us so closely to ensure that the package we have in place will do that."

 

 

Calyx is a leading independent ICT provider in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Established in 2002 and under private ownership since 2007, Calyx employs over 400 staff across twelve locations and has a  turnover in excess of €100 million.

 

 

Calyx offers  flexible extensions to organisations' own  IT Services and ICT strategies, by providing specialist design, build, install and support capabilities across the entire range of ICT.

 

It has expertise in Workspace, Voice, Data, Unified Communications Applications, Connectivity, Security, Infrastructure Management, Communications and WAN Carrier Services.

 

Colleges Northern Ireland is the voice of Further and Higher Education in Northern Ireland and provides a range of support mechanisms to its member Colleges.

 

 

 

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