Virgin Wines Announces Managed Services Deal with NaviSite Europe

Online wine company Virgin Wines has struck a managed services deal with NaviSite Europe, a Time Warner Cable company. NaviSite will provide managed hosting and web application services for the wine merchant as part of an update to its IT systems.

Virgin, which was established as part of Richard Branson’s empire, was subsequently bought out by Direct Wines and underwent a management buyout last year. As part of the buyout the company need to update its IT systems and find a new MSP to deliver hosting and managed application support.

NaviSite’s services are critical to the company’s success, since it operates purely online and requires high levels of uptime and stability. The service provider is also offering colocation and cloud services to Virgin Wines via its U.K. data centers. Managed support includes running web servers and application servers as well as the company’s database system.

“As an online service we don’t have that one-on-one customer experience like traditional retailers, so the website experience is very important for our customers,” said David Wyatt, social media and communications manager, Virgin Wines. “As customers increasingly want services on demand, uptime is crucial. If the platform is down then they will just go elsewhere. Even a short outage can impact our profits significantly.”

NaviSite’s services can easily handle peaks and spikes in customer volume. Virgin is also steadily expanding its business and has been aiming to attract 100,000 new customers per year, which the MSP has the flexibility and scalability to accommodate.

“With users able to order what they want, when they want, customers expect services to be available, responsive and secure,” said Sean McAvan, managing director, NaviSite Europe. “We believe that our expertise in supporting clients in the online retail sector, partnered with our tailored approach, system quality and reliability means that NaviSite is an ideal partner for Virgin Wines and other online retailers.”