Balfour Beatty WorkPlace Chooses Confirm® OnDemand from Pitney Bowes Business Insight to Maintain Southampton's Highways |
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Pitney Bowes Business Insight
26 Wellington Street East, Suite 500
Toronto, Canada
Press release date: January 12, 2011
Rapidly deployed on-demand solution lowers cost of ownership and enables more flexible licensing
Windsor, Berks - Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) - a global leader in location intelligence, data management and customer communication management software, data and services - today announced that Balfour Beatty WorkPlace has chosen Confirm OnDemand - PBBI's on-demand-based infrastructure asset maintenance and management system - to support its £100 million Highways Services Partnership with Southampton City Council. PBBI's contract with Balfour Beatty WorkPlace is worth £170k and is initially for five years, with the potential of a five year extension.
Southampton City Council had previously been using Confirm as an on-premise application to manage its highways maintenance programme. Through integration with PBBI's MapInfo Professional location intelligence GIS software, the Council was able to pinpoint defects in the road network and associated assets and expedite the necessary repairs. On taking up the highways contract, Balfour Beatty WorkPlace recognised the value of Confirm, but also wanted to make the maintenance programme more cost-effective.
Balfour Beatty WorkPlace quickly identified that moving to Confirm OnDemand provided an ideal solution. Moving Confirm from an on-premise to on-demand environment has already significantly reduced hardware, implementation and management costs. This is because Southampton's Confirm OnDemand system is run as part of a multi-tenanted infrastructure where hardware and management costs are effectively shared between organisations.
Flexible licensing is also an important benefit of Confirm OnDemand. Entering a five year agreement as the public sector faces unprecedented cutbacks following the Comprehensive Spending Review, Southampton and Balfour Beatty WorkPlace needed an asset management system that was scalable and adaptable to changing requirements. Confirm OnDemand allows user licenses to be increased or reduced as and when required - for example, to facilitate a fixed term project. This pay-per-use model means that Balfour Beatty WorkPlace and the Council never have to spend money on licenses they don't need.
Another advantage of Confirm OnDemand enjoyed by Balfour Beatty WorkPlace was the speed of its deployment. The system was fully operational less than five weeks after contracts were signed, including the physical migration of the on-premise data. The on-demand model also enables Southampton to easily run test, development and training environments within Confirm, as well as the live environment. This helps Balfour Beatty WorkPlace's inspectors to quickly master the software.
"In the current environment, where cost savings are everything, we really value the flexibility of Confirm OnDemand," said Nigel Gibbons, Head of ICT at Balfour Beatty WorkPlace. "The on-demand environment significantly reduces our capex and enables us to concentrate on the practical benefits that Confirm delivers, rather than diverting valuable man-hours on management and support of the software. The ability to scale our user licences as and when required also means that we have much tighter control over our ongoing spend."
About Confirm Confirm is a modular software solution for the maintenance and management of public infrastructure assets and services including Highways, Lights, Structures, Street Works, Property Maintenance, Grounds, Trees, Cleansing and Waste. The system can be used by the asset steward organisations, service providers, partners, mobile workers and stakeholders in the value chain. With its powerful reporting capabilities, Confirm facilitates and underpins optimised asset maintenance without adding administrative overhead.
About Pitney Bowes Business Insight Pitney Bowes Business Insight, a division of Pitney Bowes Software Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pitney Bowes Inc., helps organisations to acquire, serve and grow customer relationships. Our leading-edge solutions in the areas of Customer Intelligence, Customer Communications and Customer Care enhance our customers' operational systems and workflows, enabling them to manage their customer relationships more effectively. We offer unique and compelling capabilities, including location intelligence; GIS; predictive analytics; data quality, management and integration; and customer communications management. In combination, our solutions and capabilities deliver customer insights that create competitive advantages. Leading companies, government agencies and systems integrators rely on our global expertise and decades of leadership to improve their operational effectiveness and business results. Visit www.pbinsight.co.uk and www.pb.com for more information.
For further information, please contact: Joe Banks/Robert Hickling Say Communications +44 (0)20 8971 6400 PBBI@saycomms.co.uk
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