Data-Shield and GMT360 partnership creates UK centre of technical excellence

Data-Shield Ltd, a storage and data connectivity specialist has announced a partnership with GMT360 Ltd, a specialist independent IT services company to create a new business with the capability to deliver the UK’s widest range of technical engineering services spanning 55 networking, server, storage and telecommunication vendors.

Over the last two decades, experts from both companies have been delivering a range of services to a growing list of prominent UK organisations including Aon, Prudential, British Airways, Santander, DVLA, National Air Traffic Service plus a further 240 organisations. In addition, both Data-Shield and GMT360 were formed by a core of senior technical experts that had previously delivered work for several leading IT vendors and then subsequently setup business as independent specialists.

“One of our differentiators is that our technical teams have a deep expertise across a broad range of current and legacy equipment, we often boast that if you have an obscure bit of kit in your data-centre, one of our team will have probably written part of the user manual,” explains David Carr, Managing Director, for Data-Shield, “However, there are a number of vendors and platforms that we have never focused on and GMT360 are a seasoned team with an extremely high level of expertise within these critical systems.”

GMT360 has well developed competencies in the delivery of implementation, maintenance and support services around a number of vendors including IBM, HP, HDS, EMC, Sun, Dell and Cisco. “The team from Data-Shield are well respected, particularly around the support of more complex data centre environments and as a partnership, we believe, that we now have the broadest range of technical skills of any specialist IT services provider in the UK,” says Neale Brooks, Head of Service Delivery for GMT360.

A key focus for the partnership will be to offer cost effective “third party" services to IT solution providers and manufacturing partners across the UK and Western Europe. Data-Shield and GMT360 already provide many of these contractor services to organisations including IBM, Fujitsu, SCC, HP, Phoenix, CSC and several others. In addition, the partnership extends the geographic reach and extended “out of hours” coverage for urgent break and fix services.

“This partnership is a win-win deal for all involved and allows us to work closely with a technical team that we both professionally respect and also technically compliment,” adds David Carr, Managing Director for Data-Shield, “Our plan moving forward is to extend our joint services to existing customers to help many of these organisations reduce costs through “single supplier” full coverage maintenance and support contracts across a wider portfolio of computing, networking, telecommunication and storage equipment across the UK and western Europe.”