News release

HP Enables U.K. Internet Telephony Company Gradwell to Thrive Through Recession

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HP today announced it helped Gradwell, the U.K.’s third-largest internet telephony service provider for small businesses, boost its 2009 revenue by 60 percent through decreased system downtime, which allowed customers to make more calls per month.

In January 2009, Gradwell experienced an IT failure that resulted in five hours of system downtime during peak business hours. As a result, the company realized its IT systems needed rapid augmentation to cope with present and future needs.

HP was chosen to build a cost-efficient and reliable hosting platform that could scale to meet changing needs. The new platform included the deployment of HP BladeSystem technology with HP ProLiant BL490c G6 servers and HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 and the replacement of Gradwell’s third-party storage with an HP P4000 SAN.

“HP offered the best product in the market along with superb technical and sales engagement at a cost-effective price,” said Peter Gradwell, founder and managing director of Gradwell. “But most importantly, implementation of this technology has led to an increase in our customers’ confidence in us.”

Customer confidence, which had dipped after the IT failure, returned after the deployment of the new platform, evidenced by a 29 percent monthly call revenue increase. System availability has run at 100 percent every month since implementation and the new HP infrastructure, which consolidated eight racks into five, has decreased power monthly costs significantly.

Performance also has improved, with the HP P4000 SAN boosting throughput more than tenfold to 70 megabits per second. And, Gradwell can now take advantage of reporting capabilities that show utilization, throughput and other statistics, making it easier to do capacity planning and recognize potential problems quickly.

Under the new platform, Gradwell has been able to greatly reduce troubleshooting costs while freeing up staff time for more valuable projects that can save more money and boost revenue.

“Gradwell needed to maximize uptime and minimize costs to bring customers an advantage in internet telephony,” said Christian Keller, vice president, Industry Standard Server Business ¬– Europe, the Middle East and Africa, HP. “HP provided a simplified and flexible converged infrastructure that reduced costs and power consumption while freeing up business resources.”

Based in Bath, England, Gradwell serves 18,000 customers and handles 6 million minutes of incoming and outgoing calls per month.

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