Client testimonial - Play.com

"Play.com is a fast growing online retailer and as its Head of IT Services, I need to be sure our technology provider is able to meet the extremely stringent demands of our 'always on' business.

Play.com is what the banks call a Level 1 Merchant.  That means we handle in excess of six million credit card transactions a year and as such we are bound by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCIDSS), which are (quite rightly) very exacting on how we handle and store card holder data - it affects our organisation's whole IT infrastructure.   Our chosen data centre has to meet the same standards and Foreshore does.  It was I believe, one of the first to gain this very high level accreditation.

Our IT equipment is hosted in multiple dedicated cages at Foreshore's Queens Road site.  We occupy a significant amount of space there within a fully virtualised infrastructure and our hardware runs on modern technology that uses a very low power footprint.

Foreshore provides fully managed internet connectivity, a virtualised infrastructure and a 'remote hands service' that's absolutely essential for the daily management and maintenance of our systems and hardware.   24 hour monitoring and on- site technical assistance are really important to us - we get advanced notification of anything that may be revenue affecting or customer facing and really value the level of proactivity that we receive.

As well as knowing we're in safe hands we need absolute assurance of guaranteed 100% uptime 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - and we need it to be scalable. We service clients, including some of the top retailers, in theUKand continentalEurope.  At Christmas when we have peak order times we are dealing with up to 1000 orders a minute - so there is no margin for error and the capacity to meet those peaks in demand is essential.  Foreshore has never failed us and its global Content Delivery Network (CDN) delivers an even faster user experience to our customers.

I have worked with a number of data centres and Foreshore stands out by some margin as the best.   We have a close working relationship between technical teams and have benefited from their expertise and collaborated on technical designs and networks and more recently on private cloud computing.  

They are highly focused on what they deliver, extremely professional and proactive in their approach to helping us with our business challenges and have enabled Play to drive its business growth with certainty of delivery.  This is a trusted partnership based on mutual understanding of common goals and I could not recommend them more highly."

Mark Milward - Head of IT Services