Gloucester City Homes selects Exponential-e to boost support for tenants  

Exponential-e has been selected by independent social landlord, Gloucester City Homes, to deliver cloud and networking services to support its move towards becoming a digital-first organisation. Exponential-e will use its super-fast 100-gig ethernet network to deliver a virtual desktop infrastructure that provides employees with access to a persistent, personal desktop from any device or location.

“Since its foundation in 2005, Gloucester City Homes has undergone a massive amount of change,” explained Lee Wade, CEO at Exponential-e. “It has successfully transitioned from operating as an arm’s length management organisation with all its ICT infrastructure and services being provided by the local council to an independent body with complex backend demands controlling everything from renewing tenancy agreements to managing burst drains.”

As part of the engagement, Gloucester City Homes wanted to ensure its IT infrastructure refresh would result in better customer service standards. Since all services are delivered down a single piece of fibre, Gloucester City Homes has the flexibility to easily scale or adapt its infrastructure to meet its changing needs. In addition, Exponential-e provides constant managed service support and security assurance so that Gloucester City Homes doesn’t have to invest large amounts of resource in managing the system.

“In just a short space of time, we’ve already seen the benefits that a secure and stable infrastructure delivers. Staff can now move from a desk to a meeting room to home and pick up their desktop in exactly the same state as they left it,” explained Lesley Williams, Head of IT at Gloucester City Homes. “This makes a huge difference and provides us with an opportunity to deliver better assistance. For example, we recently underwent a programme where our 5,200 tenants needed to renew their tenancy agreements as part of our separation from the council. Previously this would have been a manual, paper-based process. However, the flexibility of the infrastructure means we have been able to use a combination of mobile and laptops to run events that allow people to refresh their agreements from designated locations throughout the city, something that was more convenient for our tenants and enabled more efficient processing.”

Additional benefits of choosing Exponential-e and its cloud and networking services include:

Improved user performance – with a resilient network in place, logging in and loading high-bandwidth applications has become quicker
Secure data centre ­– adhering to ISO accreditations ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 20000, ISO 22301, ISO CSA STAR
Business continuity – enhanced disaster recovery through a hosted data centre and replication to secondary data centres
24/7 support ­– constant access to service desk support to easily rectify any faults
Enhanced security – through identity and access management controls that enrich endpoint security coupled with a private cloud network that ensures data resides on the clean side of the firewall
Greater flexibility – to combine different services into a cohesive solution, delivered under a single service level agreement with a single point of contact to manage enquires and resolve incidents

“Following Exponential-e’s successful track record in the housing sector and the recommendations that it was able to provide from existing customers, we have confidence that our partnership will be successful,” concluded Lesley Williams at Gloucester City Homes. “We wanted a provider that would help us to continue improving our customer service levels and we now have a network in place that allows us to focus on meeting the needs of our tenants and delivering a working environment that helps attract and retain the best talent. We look forward to building our relationship further.”