Cable & Wireless is a long-standing, trusted provider of fully managed, nationwide Frame Relay-based data networking services to successful UK application service provider Netstore. These support critical business applications, such as financial management software, for Netstores geographically dispersed customer base, hosted at Netstores secure data centres in the South East and North East of England.

The flexibility of Cable & Wirelesss managed Frame Relay service, its inherent support for migration to other technologies, and the breadth of its UK coverage, have been critical in enabling Netstore to provide and grow its services. Without Cable & Wireless, Netstore wouldnt be able to operate, and without Netstore, its customers businesses would grind to a halt.

As Netstores customers ambitions grow, their demand for flexible and high-bandwidth networking is increasing too, which means Netstore needs to be one step ahead at all times. Its relationship with Cable & Wireless, with its continual investment in new services, gives the company this capability. Currently, the company is looking at supplementing its Frame Relay service with ADSL connectivity, and may begin migrating to Cable & Wirelesss MPLS-based VPN service when its current contract comes up for renewal in 2005.

As an application service provider (ASP), hosting and managing critical business software on behalf of its customers, Netstore relies fundamentally on reliable, high-speed data networking services to be able to deliver on its promises to customers. If its service provider goes down, so does Netstores business and that of its clients.

Netstore, founded in 1996, was the first ASP to achieve a London Stock Exchange listing in April 2000. It was one of the first Microsoft Certified ASP Partners in the world and is a Microsoft Gold Accredited Partner today. It is growing at a pace, too. Last year alone, the company handled more than 2,000,000,000+ database operations per day, processed 150,000 emails a day, and captured and exterminated over 38,000 viruses.

Netstores diverse customer base spans a wide range of industries, from local authorities and housing associations, to finance, banking, insurance and the legal sector. Names range from Northern Rock, BA and Powergen, to councils up and down the country, and even the NHS. The common thread that unites these companies is the average size of their individual premises, and the fact that they needed the freedom from capital expenditure, management costs and upgrade issues associated with running their main business applications internally. By outsourcing the hosting and management of these to a third party, they have freed up their time and resources to focus on running their core businesses.

Because the applications hosted and managed by Netstore are so critical to the businesses they support these include financial and accounting applications, business intelligence software, data storage and backup, printing, cheque processing and BACs transmissions, all of which must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week - Netstores data communications network is more important than that of most organisations. Consistently high performance, and network availability, reliability and security, are paramount. If the service were ever compromised, Netstore would quickly lose customers, not to mention its reputation.

National support is vital too. Netstores client base spans the full length and breadth of the country, from as far north as Elgin (north of Inverness) down to Poole in Dorset, and from Ipswich in the east all the way across to Bridgend in south Wales. So, when Netstore set out to find an infrastructure partner to support its business, an ability to provide nationwide customer support was as important to the company as finding the right technology.

Says Doug Rogers, infrastructure manager at Netstore: Cable & Wireless worked on the original design of the network, and maintains and manages it on a 24x7 basis, 365 days a year, something we just couldnt do ourselves. They do this from their management centre in Hammersmith. One of the reasons we chose Cable & Wireless as our networking partner was because they could provide a full service where most others couldnt. They have national coverage, without having to use partners, and we have a single point of contact and single account team for all the services they provide to us on a national basis. With customers as widespread as ours, it was vital to be able to offer a four-hour maintenance response to all locations, which again was something we couldnt have offered directly.

The relationship with Cable &Wireless, which already provided voice services to the company, dates back to the origins of Netstores ASP business. This began in 1998 under the ownership of Internet service provider QSP, which subsequently went into receivership. Netstore bought the ASP business in 2001, renewing the existing contract with Cable & Wireless.

The service used by Netstore, Cable & Wireless Frame Relay, is an end-to-end, managed data networking service carrying data at rates of up to 45Mbit/s. It is ideal for interconnecting LANs because it is designed to handle the 'bursty' or fluctuating traffic patterns generated by people sending email or exchanging files, and supports client-server applications. Each site needs just one connection to the Cable & Wireless data network, instead of a connection to every other LAN - the network provides all the interconnections, minimising equipment and connection charges.

The service is provided via fixed links of between 56 kbit/s and 45 Mbit/s depending on the location. Netstores Frame Relay-based network speeds vary up to very high capacities of 12 Mbit/s, which is able to amply support Netstores customers most data-intensive financial services applications, or very large customers such as Essex County Council.

When the network was first designed, Frame Relay was the leading technology for this type of activity, Rogers recalls. It is reliable and scalable, and enabled us to provide SLA-based, private, secure connections between our customers and our facility in Gateshead.

The flexibility of the technology, which is already inherently secure, enables Netstore to provide added resilience at little extra cost, thanks to the ability to back up its main connection in Gateshead via secondary private virtual connections to a second data centre. This negates a second set of dedicated lines, as would have been required with a leased line solution. This would have been prohibitively expensive, Rogers notes.

A further advantage of Frame Relay over alternative solutions such as leased lines is its compatibility with other, newer technologies, such as MPLS-based IP-VPNs, which introduce intelligence into the network to enable differentiation between and prioritisation of one type of network traffic over another. This is something Rogers wants to consider when its current contract with Cable & Wireless comes up for renewal next year: If the costs are right, we may well decide to migrate to this more modern technology. The nice thing about Cable & Wirelesss Frame Relay solution is that its easy to migrate, and we could run the two networks in parallel for a while to allow a gradual transition.

Cable & Wirelesss Carrier MPLS service enables service providers to deliver national and international IP-VPN services over the companys global IP-VPN quality-of-service (QoS)-based network. This is a high-speed wide-area networking service with advanced customer reporting provided via a Web portal. It runs over a secure, dedicated, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) backbone. MPLS-based networks can carry any type of traffic in IP format, providing Class of Service mapping, so that time-sensitive or business-critical data can be given priority over less latency-sensitive applications such as email or Web browsing.

The advantages to Netstores customers if the company migrated to this network could be multiple, since MPLS-based IP VPNs support any-to-any connectivity as well as the standard hub-and-spoke network configuration favoured by Frame Relay. This would enable Netstore to offer a new type of service to its customers:

If we had MPLS connectivity, we could configure this so that this becomes our customers inter-site connections. This would give them flexible, affordable, high-speed, secure connectivity between their main office and branch offices, without the need for dedicated leased lines. Rogers envisages that Netstore would resell this managed service on Cable & Wirelesss behalf. This would enable us to lock customers into our services, too, he adds.

Another option under consideration is Cable & Wirelesss DSL service to replace existing ISDN connections for applications such as backup, in response to growing customer demands. Essex County Council, for example, now uses 4Mbit/s circuits, which exceed the capacity of ISDN. Says Rogers: Again, xDSL services are compatible with Frame Relay, so this is a further option for expanding bandwidth and increasing network resilience for our customers.

How exactly the current network will be developed next year and beyond remains up for discussion, but in the meantime Netstore is happy that its customers needs are being addressed and their expectations surpassed, thanks to the capacity and performance of the Frame Relay infrastructure it has invested in.

We have industry-leading service-level agreements and the capabilities to meet these, notes James Fowler, Netstores account manager at Cable & Wireless. Our SLAs are among the most stringent around with regard to our commitment to delivering maximum network uptime, and the processes we have in place to report and rectify any faults. This means that, if there is ever a problem, we know about it and are fixing it before Netstore or their customers are any the wiser. If for any reason, we were ever unable to deliver, we would compensate the customer to a higher degree than other service providers - such is our confidence in our ability to exceed the customers expectations.

To this end, Cable & Wireless has allocated a substantial, dedicated account team to managing the Netstore infrastructure and the relationship between the two companies and Netstores customers. This includes an account specialist, a project implementation manager, a pre-sales data consultant and a service manager. No fewer than three help lines are dedicated to the company too one for services, one for fault reporting, and a third for billing issues. All are manned around the clock by four or five dedicated staff.

As the infrastructure provider, we are Netstores services, after all, Fowler adds. We all function as one virtual team. The way the network is configured, their customers are effectively our customers; if we go down, they do. So we dont differentiate between Netstore and their customers when it comes to our responsiveness.