Howard Kennedy drives vision and business growth

Leading data centre and cloud service provider Proact has helped domestic and international law firm Howard Kennedy power its significant digital transformation projects. Having completed two mergers since 2013, and with a 2020 vision to grow to a ?100million company, Howard Kennedy looked to future-proof its IT systems by ensuring that the underlying infrastructure had the capacity and performance to support business growth.

Wednesday, 2nd May 2018 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Following a performance review of existing systems, Proact looked to modernise Howard Kennedy’s architecture by designing and implementing a high performance and feature rich data centre solution, which offered the lowest risk and most cost effective route to achieve the firm’s goals. Proact transformed the company’s primary and secondary data centres, introducing fast, scalable and robust enterprise-class technologies which delivered appropriate levels of business continuity.

Operations are supported by Proact’s Managed Cloud Services, a model which has made IT infrastructure investments an “off balance” expense for Howard Kennedy, eliminating spikes in capital expenditure with predictable monthly payments. With access to Proact’s skilled experts, the lean internal IT team at the law firm can draw on Proact’s knowledge to maintain peak performance from systems, concentrating on strategic projects.

By designing and implementing a solution which uses latest generation technology, Howard Kennedy can take advantage of a best-of-breed platform which will provide a solid infrastructure foundation for many years to come. While delivering more capacity, greater performance and dramatically reducing latency, Proact’s design also reduced risk to key business workloads. Additionally, Proact’s solution used technology that Howard Kennedy’s IT team was familiar with, reducing training needs and allowing the department to quickly engage with the new systems.

With 20+ years’ experience when it comes to delivering successful IT infrastructure projects, Proact had the advanced capabilities required to design and seamlessly install the new systems, complimenting the existing architecture and causing minimal disruption to day-to-day operations. Proact also provided project management and training services, ensuring that Howard Kennedy could get the most from the new technologies.

“Proact’s long-term strategy means that Howard Kennedy can scale as new services and demands are added, while also offering the company the flexibility to change with business needs throughout the lifespan of the contracts. We have vast experience in the legal sector and have worked with three of the five largest law firms in the UK, which means we have the commercial and technical expertise that’s required to support transformations in this demanding industry,” says Martin Thompson, Acting Managing Director at Proact UK.

Clive Knott, IT Director at Howard Kennedy, says: “It’s a pleasure to work with Proact. These projects have significantly improved our IT capacity and performance, ensuring the underlying infrastructure supports our 2020 vision of growth via acquisitions, with a fixed monthly cost and guaranteed cost per GB for any expansion.”