Lanway scores with Burnley FC

VAR bags end-to-end infrastructure contract with newly promoted football club

VAR Lanway is kitting out Burnley Football Club with a new IT infrastructure in preparation for its return to the Premier League.

The Burnley-based reseller revealed it had won the deal as it announced it had broken through the £15m turnover barrier.

Talking to CRN, Lanway managing director Andrew Henderson (pictured below) said his local club needed help bolstering its network to meet the stringent connectivity and resilience requirements of the Premier League.

The deal, which includes kit from HP, Avaya and Microsoft and must be fully implemented before the new season kicks off next month, is worth about £0.5m to Lanway, he said.

"We have been servicing Burnley Football Club for 10 years but this is the biggest single investment they have made in IT and we are proud to be part of it," he said.

"With them going into the Premier League, the requirements are massive, with three or four TV stations plugging into the network. The timescale is quite tight."

The contract includes a fully virtualised stack from HP and Microsoft, HP desktops, migration to Microsoft Office 365 and a communications system based on Avaya and Microsoft Lync.

Lanway saw turnover for its year to 31 March 2014 rise 29 per cent to £15.7m, Henderson said, thanks in part to the contribution of recent acquisition Cleverboxes. Net profit more than doubled to £384,000.

"The numbers are going to be over £20m this year, with a significant increase in net profit," Henderson said, adding that the firm recently introduced a new staff training and development programme, dubbed Lanway Academy.

"We moved into selling services three or four years ago and although we've not completed the transition we are a services business now," he added. "We still sell hardware as a door opener and are still making money off it."

As well as having professional and managed services teams, Lanway has developed a cloud practice and has rolled out about 20,000 Office 365 seats, Henderson said.