The client

Blue Diamond is the second-largest garden centre group in the UK and Channel Islands. In 2019, the business entered a period of rapid growth, acquiring seven major independent garden centres alongside nine sites from the Wyevale Group.

The challenge

For a fast-moving retail operation, always-on data and connectivity are critical. Each newly acquired site came with its own telecoms infrastructure, hosting arrangements and network limitations, creating complexity, inefficiency and rising costs.

Systems ranged from on-premise hosting in Guernsey to multiple disparate ISPs, with inconsistent and often poor network coverage across large sites, some spanning more than 70 acres. All of this needed to be integrated and aligned, without impacting sales or introducing downtime.

The solution

Working with specialist partners, we designed and delivered a bespoke cloud-based solution, including a unified communications platform and a tailored DECT deployment to support the scale of the garden centres.

All systems were migrated to the cloud through an approach that prioritised resilience and continuity, ensuring Blue Diamond could maintain uptime and continue delivering a high standard of customer service throughout the transition.

“…they have more than met our high standards, guaranteeing 100% uptime.”

Lee Brocklehurst, Group IT Manager at Blue Diamond Group

The results

Thirty-seven UK retail sites, more than 300 staff, 1,100 email accounts, over 1,000 mobile devices, in excess of 10TB of data and dozens of virtual private servers across multiple data centres were successfully migrated into a single, unified environment by 00:01.

Lee Brocklehurst, Group IT Manager at Blue Diamond Group, said: “(They) transferred our critical core infrastructure by one minute past midnight. This enabled us to be ready for trading in 37 of our branches by 7am the next morning. Since that magic minute, they have more than met our high standards, guaranteeing 100% uptime.”