Logicalis awarded five-year contract with UK biotech business

International solutions provider Logicalis has been awarded a five-year managed services contract with Avecia Biologics worth £2.7m.

The service will include 24/7 management and monitoring of Avecia's server farms, applications and storage area network (SAN) and will support its consolidated IT infrastructure, as well as supporting compliance regulations stipulated by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

The contract award follows a significant restructure of Avecia in which the business needed to upgrade and consolidate its legacy IT infrastructure to meet the demands of the pharmaceutical industry.

'We've recently re-organised the business and therefore it was important to reflect this within our existing IT architecture,' said Campbell Kay, head of IT for Avecia.

'By consolidating and upgrading our assets, we would not only improve the efficiency of our applications and processes, but also assure our customers of the continuous development of our compliance programme.

'The availability and accuracy of information is critical to the pharmaceutical industry, and in this respect, round-the-clock systems management & monitoring to support all our IT processes is essential for the operation of our business and for the stringent compliance auditing and reporting purposes.'

Prior to the managed services contract being awarded, Logicalis designed and delivered a virtualisation project for Avecia and implemented the subsequent managed service.

Tom Kelly, managing director, Logicalis UK, said: 'Avecia's decision to adopt virtualisation techniques, and deploy an on-demand virtual IT team means they now have the agility to transform their IT estate as often as their business model changes.'