ANS turns Salford council into cloud reseller

VAR wins multimillion-pound contract to act as cloud provider to local authority

VAR ANS has won a multimillion-pound contract to act as the provider to Salford City Council as it rolls out its own cloud offering.

Known as the "community cloud" project, the three-year contract will see ANS implement its infrastructure 3.0 datacentre based on FlexPod architecture. The installation will consist of Cisco UCS Blades, NetApp storage, full VMware virtualisation and Cisco Nexus switches.

In turn, the council will be able to generate a new revenue stream by offering cloud services to local businesses and has replaced its own aging IT infrastructure.

Paul Sweeney, managing director of the Manchester-based VAR, said: “It is great to see a council like Salford leading the way with this highly enterprising activity, which I envisage will be emulated by many other councils nationwide. It is also fantastic for local businesses to have this resource.”

Jon Burt, corporate infrastructure architect at Salford City Council, said: “ANS Group listened to what Salford wanted in terms of equipping them with the ability to resell the cloud-based platform they are providing us with. Not only are they providing more for less, but allowing us to reseller this to local businesses.”

John Mullen, assistant mayor for IT at Salford City Council, added: “We want Salford to be a connected city with a good technological infrastructure. By making cloud services available to local businesses, we are improving what the city is able to offer while also generating much-needed income for the council at a time of extreme budget cuts.”