Phoenix, one of the UK’s leading providers of hosting, Cloud, business continuity and managed IT services, has signed a multi-million pound deal to deliver refreshed IT infrastructure and on-going IT services for automotive specialist Manheim’s UK operations.

Headquartered in Atlanta Georgia, USA, Manheim is one of the world’s largest automotive firms offering business-to-business products and services to a broad range of business customers. The agreement with Phoenix will see Manheim consolidate its UK IT infrastructure, multi-site hosting, backup and replication, management, monitoring and remote and onsite support for their European operations.

Furthermore, Phoenix will provide deskside support, hardware support and warranty management as part of an on-going service. The new, dedicated virtual platform will consolidate servers and services at a number of sites throughout the UK into the Phoenix data centre environment.

Jeremy Lewis, CIO from Manheim said: “The decision to consolidate and refresh our IT infrastructure into the Phoenix data centre environment builds on an already successful hosting partnership with Phoenix which commenced in 1999.

“Rather than continue with a disjointed approach utilising multiple sites and providers, we recognised that refreshing our IT environment and transferring it to the Phoenix data centre would be the most cost-effective and efficient route forward. This approach has highlighted an ease of management we’d not experienced with the previous environment,” he concluded.

In addition to the commercial and system management drivers behind the decision to commit to Phoenix, Manheim also identified the opportunity to streamline and improve the deskside support function which included the transfer (under TUPE) of 11 of the existing Manheim staff to Phoenix.

Nick Dean, Managed Services & Hosting Director at Phoenix said: “Increasingly, we are seeing more and more firms, in a similar position to Manheim, outsourcing their IT infrastructure. It provides them with a cost-effective, secure and reliable platform, allowing total freedom while reducing complexity and risk. It allows customers to concentrate on what they do best, leaving us to do what we do best.”