Everyone’s banging on about the cloud these days, but in terms of business benefits, it’s all a bit, erm… cloudy.

Crabtree & Evelyn has evolved from a small, family-run business – specialising in fine soaps from around the world – to an international organisation with outlets in ten countries, from Australia to the US.

But up until recently, the company’s 37 UK stores were using dial-up connections and an outdated point of sale (POS) solution. In a multichannel world, with sky-high customer expectations, the existing set-up had taken the company as far as it could.

With payment card industry (PCI) compliance putting even more pressure on, the overworked IT team decided it needed a smarter system – one that helped support multichannel trading, meet PCI compliance and free the team to push the business forward.

Because we can provide a one-stop shop for retailers we were able to come up with a complete solution built on:

  1. A virtual data centre
  2. State-of-the-art POS
  3. Managed payment service

And that one-stop shop approach extends to support as well – Crabtree & Evelyn have just one number to call if there any problems. You can read the full case study here.

IT director Tim Johnson explain why Crabtree & Evelyn chose BT

So how does the cloud help?

Well, by not having to buy and maintain all the hardware, Crabtree & Evelyn benefits from an infrastructure as a service approach. Virtual data centres offer far greater agility and resilience than traditional set-ups, while the total cost of ownership is reduced with charges based on usage.

Added to this is the attraction of an OPEX investment model through a cloud-based system.

The managed payment service aspect of the integrated solution also means Crabtree & Evelyn doesn’t have to worry about keeping up with an ever-changing PCI standard. That’s now our problem. But the real value comes in bringing all of this together in one solution from one supplier – cutting through the complexity.

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