With its 3 year hosting contract with Attenda up for renewal, Debenhams decided to examine the possibility of managing the Web application and its supporting infrastructure in-house. Assessing existing internal IT operations capabilities, the IS Director at Debenhams was keen to see if he could reduce his costs by leveraging some of the internal tools and resources to operate the site in house. He commented,

"I thought I was in a strong position to bring our Internet hosting back in house."

A detailed examination of the comparative costs of providing internal 24 x 7 support for the Debenhams Web infrastructure was conducted. This included costs for the skilled staff, best practice operations processes and industry leading monitoring and management tools required to manage the application effectively.

The results of Debenhams's assessment gave a very clear indication of the cost benefits of selective outsourcing.

"When I took all the factors into account - our internal expertise, the investments that Attenda has made in virus protection and proactive online monitoring I realised that I would have to make a significant investment to compete on price and service. It would have required ten extra people and cost 200 per cent more", the IS Director explained.

Debenhams renewed their contract. The site remains hosted in Attenda's Data centre on 26 dedicated servers where they receive the 24-hour specialist monitoring and management required for one of the UK's leading e-commerce site. A Debenhams spokesperson commented,

"If they detect a performance bottle neck on a server or one that is approaching its capacity threshold, they take preventative action. That stops it becoming visible to the customer. They also provide management reports on the state of our services. These demonstrate to me that our online brand is in safe hands."

Whilst cost was clearly an issue for Debenhams, the way in which their customers experience the site is always of paramount concern. For Debenhams, like all businesses, downtime is unacceptable.

"We are developing multi-channel integration so that customers can order online from a paper catalogue and pick up their purchase from a store."

"Internal research shows that a multi-channel customer spends up to 70 per cent more than a single channel customer so the systems supporting these offerings must always be available. If a system is down for one hour each month, the true pound-note value isn't significant. But the implications for the brand and customer are very serious indeed."

Through an exceptionally stable site architecture, BGP routed tier 1 ISPs and a Data centre configured for resilience throughout, the entire Debenhams solution has no single point of failure. Proactive monitoring ensures that even when problems do arise, they are rectified before they impact on the end user experience of the site. Attenda works with 75 of the UK's leading companies and is able to spread the cost of this highly expensive technology across that client base. As Debenhams discovered, delivering these service levels in house would be impossible without a multi-million, multi-year investment into people, process and technology.