Since Systematics became a wholly independent company five years ago, the progress and change in our IT infrastructure has been dramatic.

Six years ago, all of our work was produced on shared resources. Our parent company owned the HP/UNIX servers on which all our COBOL-based programs were held, and they also provided us with controlled access to disk storage and SQL server. We produced paper reports for the exchanges which we run, and these were hand checked and distributed by post.

Prior to the company becoming independent, we were keen to update our systems from UNIX/COBOL to a modern solution, to provide global access to all our clients, and to centralise our data stores into a more efficient, SQL-based database system. 

We also wanted to eliminate the requirement for paper based reporting, for environmental and efficiency reasons.

At the time of the management buy-out of Systematics, we needed to become fully self-sufficient with our hardware and software. Fortunately, our IT department staff had experience in large scale rollouts of IT infrastructure, and their knowledge in this field was put to good use. We obtained two new Dell servers, and a new Microsoft Partner agreement, providing us with all of the software needed for our server and office requirements.

For our internet presence, we decided that the best way to provide a resilient and reliable connection to our new web-based applications was to employ a specialist hosting company. After visiting alternative companies, we found that Rackspace provided the best balance of availability and support, and they worked well with smaller companies. The decision to use Rackspace for our hosting has been a great success; over the past six years, our system has only had 20 minutes of downtime, which is an excellent service level. Rackspace have always listened to our needs, and we recently upgraded the web server hosted at their secure data centre to a new, more powerful server in order to cater for the next five years.

With the infrastructure taken care of and in safe hands, we then began migration of our existing software from UNIX/COBOL to web-based systems. This was achieved at an accelerated pace, and provided us with the seeds of the systems which we now have in place. Whilst it was a major change to our way of working, and was a painful process at times (many late nights and high stress days were endured by us all!), the end result was worth it, as we built a solid foundation for future development projects. Our software development platform was updated to Microsoft Visual Studio, and all of our development moved to a .NET web based platform.

Now, six years on, we own all of our IT hardware and software outright, and have full control over their configuration. We have moved all of our systems to more modern platforms, allowing us to improve on the software we provide. All our solutions are globally accessible via the internet, and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As soon as we release data, it is available to our clients, who no longer have to wait for paper reports to arrive. Additionally, we are now moving towards spreadsheet-based outputs, allowing our clients to analyse data using familiar tools. Our software development knowledge has increased, and the tools available to us have improved.

Who can predict how our systems will be in five years’ time? IT moves very quickly, and business processes change and evolve. Before we moved to our new offices, the iPad didn’t exist, and a tablet was something you took for a headache! Now we have a multitude of devices which connect to the internet and allow you to work from anywhere, including most mobile phones.

Here at Systematics, we take a pragmatic approach. We always keep up to date with the latest advances in IT, and if technology provides us with the opportunity to improve our client systems we bring it into play. However, there are also many technology advances which we have declined to implement after analysing their impact versus the value which they can add to our services and systems. Over the next years you can be assured that if new IT processes and technology come into play, we will be sure to implement it where it brings added value to our clients.

Systematics IT Infrastructure (Local and remote)

by John Oatham, Senior Developer and IT Infrastructure Manager