OVERVIEW

PROCSERVE — A LEADER IN SECURE B2B eCOMMERCE

Procserve is a leader in enabling secure transactions online and powers one of the most trusted and secure commerce networks in the world. Established in 2006 to underpin the UK Government’s eCommerce strategy, Procserve’s secure networks have now carried more than £1.8 billion worth of transactions and are today used by over 13,500 buyers and 30,000 suppliers to buy, sell, and share information within online communities. Its offering includes, but is not limited to, Purchase to Pay (P2P), Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (IPaaS), electronic payment (ePayments), and dynamic marketplace solutions, as well as specialist eProcurement services.

Procserve’s platform has put the UK at the forefront of public sector eCommerce, opening the UK public sector market to thousands of SMEs. Procserve operates the only accredited platform trusted by the UK’s police forces, health service and government to deliver transactions securely within the cloud.

Jesper Lynge Petersen, CTO at Procserve, said, “Many organizations continuously renegotiate their largest contracts but they are faced with a ‘law of diminishing returns’. The problem is dealing with the long tail of smaller contracts which is much harder to manage efficiently. Departments either overspend on long-established contracts, or end up purchasing via expense accounts and losing visibility and control. Procserve makes it easy for them to manage all of these smaller contracts and maintain efficiency.”

COMPANY:Procserve

WEBSITE: www.procserve.com

INDUSTRY:Technology & Managed Services

CHALLENGE(S): After establishing itself as the leading secure eCommerce platform for the UK’s public sector, Procserve needed a cloud infrastructure that could scale to support new customers, while still providing high levels of security and data sovereignty for its existing users.

SELECTION CRITERIA: Procserve went through a structured procurement process, before concluding that CenturyLink, its existing supplier for several years, was best able to offer it the service it needed. In particular, it was looking for a solution that offered:•  Accredited levels of security•  Flexibility•  High availability

AT A GLANCE

CLOUD

UK’S LEADING SECURE eCOMMERCE PLATFORM SCALES FOR GROWTH AS IT ENTERS NEW MARKETS

“Most companies are spending 10% more than they need to and Procserve help them make that saving. We do this by using our online marketplace to deliver best value deals and efficiency savings, all assured through controls and analytics,” he continued.

Procserve provides its users with a best-in-class technology platform but also offers them support as they drive a change of procurement culture through their organizations. As well as its technology platform, it provides professional services and advice on how to maximize their savings.

Procserve is experiencing rapid growth in the volume of business coming from its existing customers, as well as adoption by new private sector companies, for example from the food and manufacturing sectors. With thousands of customers and suppliers using its service, Procserve has processed about £1.8bn of transactions to date, with £0.7bn in the last year alone.

A PLATFORM FOR EXPANSIONWhen Procserve was established, it needed to develop its own software and systems from scratch, whilst gaining the government security accreditations it needed to satisfy its public sector customers. It looked around for IT partners but found its security requirements restricted its choice. Procserve needed to operate at a minimum standard of IL2 — Impact Level 2 — which is a UK government security standard. In particular, it struggled to find a partner that was willing to invest the time in understanding its security requirements so they could ‘right-size’ the engineering of the solution.

Procserve also needed a platform that could deliver a highly available service, 24/7, and one that was flexible enough

to scale up as it was needed. Procserve established a relationship with CenturyLink Technology Solutions, to provide its managed hosted IT infrastructure.

Jesper Lynge Petersen said, “CenturyLink extended our own in-house expertise. We were a small but growing company and we wanted to stand on the shoulders of others that already had a strong reputation, were known to central government, and could support our own security accreditation.”

More recently, as Procserve’s business has begun to grow, the number of commercial transactions has started to ramp-up rapidly. The reliability of the service is also becoming increasingly critical to its customers’ business operations. For example, hospitals rely on the Procserve platform to order equipment and supplies for next day operations.

As a consequence of this success, Procserve needed to expand its managed infrastructure. It also wanted to extend the virtualization of its IT environment, as the security of virtual infrastructure had now developed to a point that made it viable to operate to the standards its customers required.Public cloud services, whilst a good way to scale, were not considered secure enough, and struggled to meet the additional requirement that sensitive government data be hosted in UK. So Procserve decided to select a partner to create a private cloud IT infrastructure that could support its next phase of growth.

A TRUSTED PARTNERProcserve went through its own formal procurement process to ensure it was getting value for money. But more important to its final decision was the trust and confidence it would expect to have in its chosen provider.

The reasons it initially selected CenturyLink several years earlier still stood — and it looked for a service provider that offered it flexibility, responsiveness and had sufficient expertise to support it through new technology adoption cycles.

“ CenturyLink helped us design our virtual infrastructure and optimize our costs, all provided as part of its standard private cloud service.”

– Jesper Petersen Head of Technology Procserve

•  Experience and expertise•  Continued solution development

SOLUTION: Procserve use a CenturyLink Technology Solutions managed service to run its secure private cloud. The infrastructure is operated from two data centers in Reading and London Docklands.

RESULTS: Procserve’s platform supports over 40,000 customers and suppliers. It gives them the confidence they need to support business critical and secure operations for much of the UK’s public sector, and now a platform to efficiently scale into the private sector and international markets.

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In addition, it was looking for global reach, to enable it to support its new multi-national customers and offer data sovereignty in other markets.

More than anything, Procserve was looking to work with a provider that it knew would continue to invest in its products and service infrastructure, giving Procserve the confidence that it would be able to take advantage of industry best-practice into the future.

PROCSERVE EXTENDS ITS CENTURYLINK PARTNERSHIPProcserve selected CenturyLink, its long-standing partner, to build out its private cloud solution.

Procserve’s private cloud is based on a managed service from CenturyLink, operating at two data centers in the UK: London Docklands and Reading. Both are ISO 27001 certified.

The private cloud solution from CenturyLink gives Procserve an economical way of providing 24/7 availability because CenturyLink has the economy of scale to support round-the-clock operations on Procserve’s behalf.

Jesper Lynge Petersen said, “The relationship with CenturyLink has evolved into more of a partnership. Day-to-day working has improved to a point where we have repeatable processes that ‘just work’.”

In the past, virtualization across multiple computing platforms hadn’t been able to satisfy Procserve’s security requirements. But as technology and security processes evolved, Procserve wanted to take advantage of the efficiencies that could be achieved from running smaller modules on many VM’s (Virtual Machines) rather than having to use lots of discrete systems. CenturyLink supported Procserve through this IT evolution, sharing its expertise and experience to develop the best solution.

Petersen said, ”CenturyLink helped us design our virtual infrastructure and optimize our costs, all provided as part of its standard private cloud service.”

A TRUSTED PLATFORM — THAT DELIVERSCenturyLink’s private cloud infrastructure has helped the Procserve platform scale to support over 30,000 suppliers, and execute over a billion pounds of transaction value.

Petersen said, “CenturyLink consistently meet their SLAs — whether that’s for server and solution availability, back-up response, or data synching. We see very few human errors and even then they rarely have any material impact. It all comes down to us having the confidence that we know we can support our customers — that’s what matters at the end of the day.”

PROCSERVE PREPARED FOR GROWTHAs well as enjoying growth from its existing user base, Procserve has expanded its business further into the private sector.

Petersen said, “Most businesses naturally focus on buying goods that are components of their own products, or goods for resale, but few focus on buying goods ‘not for resale’. This is a huge growth opportunity for them and for us. Now we have a flexible IT platform that delivers an increasing economy of scale as we take on this growth in our own business.”

Petersen concludes with this advice for others that might be in the same situation, “You need to know what your differentiators are — what matters to you — then pick the technology that best supports that. For us, a key differentiator is security and we need to hold on to that. There might be other cloud computing alternatives — but if you need security, and need to know where your data is, then CenturyLink is an ideal partner.”