EfficientIP helps Rotherham local authority combat government cuts

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council revamps core IT in just two months with EfficientIP.

EfficientIP, a provider of network services, was selected by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, the local authority for the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, to deliver IT services to 4,100 active users while driving cost savings.

Like most local authorities and government bodies in the UK, the council has been severely challenged with regular government cuts. In the last five years alone, the council had to save over £100m. To continue providing local government services such as Council Tax billing, libraries, transport, housing, planning applications or waste collection to a population of 260,000 people, and faced with a clear set of cost efficiencies and savings requirements, the council’s IT team needed a robust and competitive replacement solution.

Rotherham employs two data centres to handle the IT for the entire council and has 500+ DHCP-defined networks installed across the grid. This infrastructure handles IP requests from clients, printers and other network devices. The team started evaluating solutions from multiple vendors, including Infoblox and BlueCat, to provide DHCP service management for existing servers and future needs.

According to a company press release, following the first meeting with EfficientIP, the council was impressed by the professionalism and technical knowledge of the engineers who answered all the questions that were asked of them, and were happy to make the move.

Commenting on choosing EfficientIP, Kevin Waller, Implementation Team Manager of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, said: “From the three solutions we looked at, the value for money from EfficientIP stood out.” However, EfficientIP engineers’ efficiency and expertise was the biggest win, according to Kevin. “As an IT department, we do a lot of complex migration projects with third parties but I can’t think of one that has gone as smoothly as the one with EfficientIP.”

The whole implementation process has taken two months. Since then, the team has done numerous upgrades and no glitches occurred. “We feel comfortable for the other projects. The product is good, it doesn’t feel like we’ve switched solutions, we’ve not lost any functionality or had impacts on service,” noted Kevin.