With a history dating back to the late 18th century, Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB) is the third largest construction consultancy in the world. Its current incarnation is the result of a merger five years ago between Bucknall Austin and the already combined Rider Hunt and Levett & Bailey. The amalgamation of the three created a firm with 2,500 employees and a presence in more than 100 countries around the world.

Unlike its closest competitors, RLB isn’t listed on any stock exchanges. Instead it is owned by its employees. And the company doesn’t follow the same procedures as its peers either. Says Mark Evans, IT manager for RLB’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) regions: “It’s hard to talk about the company without sounding evangelical about it. When people instruct RLB to work with them they are employing the services of individuals with a certain flare – our people are sometimes heard to be asking what might be deemed to be slightly bizarre questions. But they take the answers away and come up with some really innovative solutions for the client's needs.”

Fragmented

With the dust settled on the merger, and RLB now operating as a truly global business, Evans knew that the company needed a new approach to its IT set up if it was to continue to break the mould and lead its field. It quickly became clear to him that the cloud could provide the answer.

“In the immediate years following our expansion, there was no real bringing together of the IT departments,” he says. “We had no infrastructure to support the sharing of systems while getting data from one place to another was nigh on impossible. Part of the problem was that the regions we cover in our EMEA business – which perhaps unique to us also covers the Caribbean – all have a number of cultural distinctions which are often contradictory of those in another of the areas. This happens anywhere really, but to a far lesser extent in Australasia or the Americas.”

Therefore, a central document management system (CDMS) was needed, with effective indexing, which could be securely and reliably accessed from multiple remote and disparate locations. With his background as an infrastructure manager in the shipping industry, Evans had actually envisioned this need as early as a decade ago when, shortly after joining what was then Bucknall Austin, he realised the limitations of the network folders system the company was operating. “Your N Drive might have been my J Drive, my H Drive might have been your S Drive, and, whatever they were, they were prone to going missing,” he says.

The brunt of the appraisal work on the third-party CDMS itself had already been done – all that was needed was the technology and platform to power and deliver it.

The solution

Evans increasingly saw the cloud as the answer, recognising that it could solve a number of problems the company had from an IT perspective, the CDMS aside.

The company already had some virtualisation in place but had to “jump through hoops with the web validation software” when they wanted to commission new servers. “You’ve also got the juggling issue,” says Evans. “Do we put eight low powered servers on one chassis or do we put two high powered servers on one chassis at a time and then try to figure out how to distribute them later?”

And the move to remote hosting is all the more pertinent for RLB for a rather more sinister reason too.

“Our headquarters building in Birmingham has actually been identified by MI5 as a potential terrorist target,” says Evans. “If something were to happen, and we lost everything from the servers, it would take us off the map – we’d lose all of our operation across three continents until we could get everything back up and running.”

That left two decisions to make – public or private and who should be the provider?

The company opted for a private cloud because the public option, though potentially more cost effective, would restrict functionality. However, Evans says the gap is closing between the two and thinks that it won’t be very long before all computing is performed on a utility style model. Leeds-based InTechnology was chosen as the solutions provider because the company’s offering “ticked a number of boxes” for RLB and Evans found a “happy synergy” between the ways the two firms worked.

“One of the biggest things is we know the exact location of our data,” says Evans. “It’s about 200 miles up the M1. I can jump in a car, drive for a couple of hours and almost touch it.”

In addition, he says it is important that InTechnology is independent and “not fronting for a larger organisation.” This provides assurance over customer service levels and there won’t be any sudden changes to data locations.

Justification

With the system in place, Evans says the company’s process efficiencies have improved beyond all measure, with its employees able to work quicker, smarter and more responsively, with the tools they need at their fingertips when they need them.

And though the difference between what RLB was previously paying to rent its equipment and what it is now paying InTechnology is negligible,  Evans says there are intangible benefits “which you can’t really put on a balance sheet” which will certainly see the company profit in the long run. This includes simply being able to offer new and improved services as a result of being able to deliver more data around the world, improving availability of working times and the use of collaborative working processes whereby personnel on different continents can work on the same project and communicate with ease.

One of the biggest benefits Evans has found is that the employees in his IT team can be put to use on tasks which utilise their talents, rather than menial chores like unboxing servers and loading operating systems onto them

“It’s ridiculous that qualified people should be doing things like that,” says Evans. “The cloud has given my guys the capacity to expand their roles so they can do more for the business. At the moment my infrastructure manager is on a PRINCE2 training course to improve our businesses and service offering. We can only do that because we’re not wasting time physically moving things around – it’s given us a lot more flexibility in how we approach the role.

“The system doesn’t need to take lunch breaks or holidays, it doesn’t drink the coffee, it doesn’t call in sick, it doesn’t mind a phone call at 3am because somebody has forgotten their password and there’s no chance that it is going to win the lottery and phone in on a Monday morning telling us to stick it. If someone was to leave we wouldn’t have to panic and get a replacement straight away that might not be the best fit for the company – it operates in the background happily while we choose the right person for the job.”

The use of the cloud also allows RLB to benefit from InTechnology’s informational data handling processes which, through de-duplication, actually reduce its net storage requirement. Across seven sites in the UK, the company had amounted five and a half terabytes purely of Word, Excel and building plan drawings. It was also storing around seven terabytes of data in a public folder storage for email. Moving everything over to the data centre has reduced these numbers considerably. What’s more, the company needs to keep records of all of its projects for seven to twelve years as a governance requirement. If it needs to pull out any of these documents now, they are all stored in one place and can all be called up from a web portal.

Finally, there’s the green issue, which RLB considers to be one of its main drivers. The company previously had to run 15 kilowatts of air con alone in the Birmingham office to keep the servers cool, never mind what the servers themselves took to power. When these were taken away the company saw its carbon emissions and electricity bill nose dive. In addition, the company is able to ‘piggyback’ a number of InTechnology’s green credentials, such as its installation of energy efficient generators to power the datacentre.

In hindsight...

Evans says there are things that he’d do differently a second time around, mostly relating to planning.
“When you move to a virtual environment you need a fairly robust plan of what you actually need,” says Evans.

“We worked out how many servers we’d need for different things but because we were under pressure to introduce the solution as quickly as possible we didn’t do as much contingency planning as we might have liked to. Then, our server environment mushroomed – we suddenly found we needed more and more but in reality I don’t think we did. You shouldn’t just throw servers at a problem as it often just masks the root cause. In a traditional environment you wouldn’t do it because you’d be paying cash for that physical server and you have to work out where to put it and how to set it up. It can happen far too easily with the cloud.

“We now need to recalculate our needs and decommission where we can but at least we won’t be sitting here with physical servers in a virtual environment – paying a lease and not using them. We should have just started with a bigger round of ‘so what?’ analysis.”

All in all though, there is no doubt in Evans’ mind that the cloud was the right way to go, having brought many unexpected benefits as well as the ones that RLB set out for.

So impressed he has been that now he is ironing out the finer details of moving the company’s emails across to cloud too.

“The cloud is not necessarily a panacea,” he says, “but its damn close.”