CLIENT Birmingham City University evolved from a number of colleges, coming together to become a multidisciplinary metropolitan institution. This development is reflected in today's multi-campus geography of the Birmingham-based university. Birmingham City University is one of Britain's largest, diverse and most successful universities. BUSINESS CHALLENGE With an ever-growing student population using its ICT systems, often outside of working hours, it became clear that to achieve the levels of availability required, the existing modern infrastructure would need constant monitoring to ensure that it met the all demands placed on it. The issues included; • An extensive IT infrastructure and systems portfolio with support resources covering office hours and the 24,000 students increasingly using it on a 24x7 basis. • Exceptionally high usage during the business-critical student enrolment period from August to September • The existing monitoring service was proving inadequate for the growing needs of Birmingham City University In order for their ICT systems to meet the demand of the user base, the university needed an IT provider that could exceed these challenges. After reviewing several vendors and considering internal options, Birmingham City University chose Thesaurus, a market-leader, to provide a remote monitoring and alerting service. SOLUTION Implemented in 2005, the service involves monitoring over twenty critical systems for the University on a 24x365 basis, raising early alerts when error conditions are detected. The service also gives Birmingham City University access to Thesaurus's technical support groups for problem resolution and is designed to ensure maximum availability of IT systems to the University. The service-monitoring suite was implemented to Birmingham City University's specific requirements, and provides a traffic-light view of their service availability – by components and by systems. The software was easily deployed without Birmingham City University needing to invest in monitoring technology and preagreed actions are now taken in the event of any error notification. Thesaurus supplement this through summary incident-reporting to Birmingham City University, which includes comments on trends observed and recommendations for actions which could be taken to prevent repeat occurrences. The service ensures that Birmingham City University maintains the high quality of service delivered as use of its systems grows, whilst dramatically reducing the risk of an IT failure having an impact on the University. The service has proved such a success that Birmingham City University have since extended their contract with Thesaurus. BENEFITS “We chose Thesaurus for their technical expertise, availability and flexibility in providing high quality managed services. Since we began working with them last year, Thesaurus has since become an integral part of the delivery of key systems to Birmingham City University”. Mike Abel, Deputy Director of IT Services.       Birmingham City University     University, Higher Education     Improve the ICT Systems Availability – out of normal working hours     Windows, Solaris and Unix based server estate     Improved quality of service to all users Greater system availability Manage out of hours load on existing ICT staff