Tourism Ireland says it has tripled network speeds and reduced costs by 30% after deploying Colt’s Optimum Managed Networking service to support its increasing use of online channels.
The tourist board, which has over eight million visitors to Ireland each year, said the improvement in network speed and reliability had "been a game-changer" for the company’s marketing strategies.
Conor Marshall, head of ICT and product strategy at Tourism Ireland, told CBR he had looked networking services from four different companies before settling with Colt in 2011.
"We chose Colt for a number of reasons; the speed of the lines the company could provide and the speed with which these could be upgraded, the company’s breadth of cover around the world, the fit of its own network with our overseas offices location, and also overall cost," he explained.
The company can also scale bandwidth overnight if necessary, rather than waiting weeks or months to install new network resources.
"In this highly competitive industry we were under pressure to increase bandwidth without increasing costs," said Marshall.
"Until we saw Colt’s service offering, we never expected to be able to both triple network speed and reduce costs by 30%. No-one else we looked at could offer anything close to this."
He added: "Uptime has definitely improved and we’re getting a much more responsive service than we’ve had before."
The solution, however, did not come with out its challenge.
"The main challenge we faced was replacing the old service with the new service seamlessly, whilst ensuring no downtime for our offices and users," said Marshall.
