Media agency leverages cloud computing to deliver on-demand marketing services to global clients and cuts costs by 60%
London, 18th Aug – Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses, revealed the achievements of a collaboration with leading UK media agency, Bezier. Over the last 12 months, the two partners have transformed Bezier’s media business using state-of-the art creative and production processes to create a unified and customer-focused service on Star’s cloud computing platform.
Bezier is a retail marketing powerhouse, with revenues of over £100 million and clients including Argos, Boots, Coca Cola, Disney, Honda and Unilever. Leading retail clients demand a full range of services from designing creative marketing campaigns, through to execution using direct mail and managing the Point of Purchase (POP) materials in-store.
Working alongside Star, Bezier set out to replace its legacy IT set-up with a single state-of-the-art private cloud capable of delivering large amounts of data rapidly to its offices countrywide. The private cloud service is combined with Star’s communications and networking capability in order to guarantee graphics files of up to 60Gb are delivered in seconds.
Chris Airey, Bezier CIO, chose Star to help him implement his vision of how cloud computing can deliver future media services that helps differentiate Bezier from its competitors. The plan was tailored to demands from Bezier’s clients to automate, often complex, project-specific marketing processes. This new direction for the company now means it delivers its own marketing software solution to client marketing teams, who increasingly expect complex services to be delivered at the click of a mouse.
Commenting on the transformation Airey noted, “The future of Bezier was clearly to digitise our offering, streamlining processes and reducing service delivery complexity. We did not want to be told by our IT supplier what was possible, instead we wanted to work with a partner which would support our new strategy and learn with us as we embark on this journey. Star was willing to evolve with us; flexibility was in their DNA.”
The cost and business agility benefits have also been tangible, Airey explained: “As part of the cultural move to embrace cloud computing, we now require less hands-on IT administration, reducing those costs by 60%. We have been able to re-negotiate existing contracts in order to replace them with something that would accelerate the execution of our plans. Fortunately, we were not held hostage to the IT decisions of the past.”
Ricky Hudson, Star CEO, commented, “CIOs have been telling us for some time that the best private cloud implementations are not just cost effective, but instead transformational, to the customer’s business. Bezier’s clarity of vision around what we could jointly achieve has reinvented and reinvigorated an already successful media business. Our belief is that while others are talking about and debating what cloud computing means to them, forward thinkers such as Bezier get real and achieve differentiated competitive advantage by choosing to partner with Star.”