Carrenza helps TerraQuest grow with flexible cloud services

TerraQuest provides a range of geo-spatial land and property services to its customers, using portal technology developed in-house. Until recently, these solutions were hosted under a co-location arrangement, but the firm found that it needed greater agility, so looked for other alternatives at the end of its five-year contract.

David Bellamy, Operations Manager at TerraQuest, explained: "We asked Carrenza and our existing provider for proposals on solutions that could be better tailored to our unique needs and were impressed with the flexible pay-as-you-grow model offered to us by Carrenza, as well as their robust and secure process and their commitment to delivering the highest level of security for all of their services."

This means that TerraQuest is able to ensure it is only paying for the precise capacity it needs, exactly when it needs it. The cloud infrastructure services offered by Carrenza can also be scaled up to cope with new demand as the business grows, or rolled back if necessary.

As a result, TerraQuest is able to mitigate many of the risks encountered when making IT investment decisions. With the co-location model, the company would have been forced to make a large upfront payment and commit to a long contract. This meant that if one of TerraQuest's customers cancelled a short time into the agreement, it would be left paying for capacity it did not need and having to absorb these extra costs into the business.
"With the Carrenza model, we can have confidence that no matter what direction our company takes in the future, we'll always have exactly the right underlying infrastructure, Bellamy said.

But this was not the only benefit of choosing Carrenza to host TerraQuest's services. The organisation has also been able to take advantage of the high availability and reliability guaranteed by Carrenza, as well as the expertise of the provider's technical team and ISO27001 certified information security processes.

Bellamy stated: "We were pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the technical support and personal account management Carrenza was able to provide to assist our in-house development team. It's a great additional value service that really makes it stand out ahead of what we were receiving previously."

The Carrenza-backed system went live during the summer of 2013 with the first customer, and TerraQuest has since added two more to the platform. As more of its clients renew their contracts, these will also be migrated on to the Carrenza platform, along with all new customers.

Organisations currently benefiting from TerraQuest's services and using Carrenza's IaaS platform are Pinpoint Chancel, which provides information services to the legal industry about chancel searches, construction firm Taylor Wimpey and Crossrail, which is responsible for one of the UK's largest rail infrastructure developments.