Augustus Asset Managers Ltd. (Augustus), an independent investment manager of segregated accounts and hedge funds, has signed a four-year IT infrastructure outsourcing deal, worth £3.5 million ($7.1 million) for the contract term, to support business continuity of its critical IT infrastructure.

The company manages over $9 billion in assets and has managed fixed income portfolios since the early 1980s, before the Citigroup World Government Bond Index was established.

The outsourcing deal with global managed IT infrastructure services provider SAVVIS, will provide Augustus with highly available trading systems, which are the "lifeblood" of the business.

Augustus will take advantage of SAVVIS’ managed hosting and utility computing model to allow more effective use of internal resources, technical expertise and IT budgets to allow it to scale rapidly to meet future growth.

Strengthening its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans was also imperative for the financial services firm. SAVVIS’ long heritage in the financial services sector means that Augustus will benefit from SAVVIS’ BCDR solutions that are used by global financial services firms, investment banks and international exchanges.

The SAVVIS offering, designed to meet Augustus’ needs, includes mirrored, dual datacenters and an off-site business continuity suite, which employees can work from, or access remotely, in case of a disastrous event such as a terrorist attack.

In addition, SAVVIS will provide a managed network, consultancy and security services for Augustus and will host all of its business applications including its trading, CRM, e-mail, risk, order management and finance systems.

“We chose to work with SAVVIS because its combination of managed hosting integrated into a managed network is extremely compelling in terms of maintaining just one strong partnership and relationship,” said Sonal Amin, information systems manager at Augustus. “By taking advantage of SAVVIS’ highly skilled Professional Services team, we developed a security policy and a highly redundant disaster recovery and business continuity solution, backed-up with SLAs. This provides availability of our mission-critical business applications, which is essential for a financial services company.”

“With over 50 employees, of which 17 are investment professionals, it is very important that we have access to best of breed solutions and technical expertise. SAVVIS was selected as we wanted our IT systems to be managed by an experienced team of professionals and the company was a perfect cultural match and organisational fit,” continued Amin. “Now my IT team can focus on keeping the applications running and business growing as opposed to keeping the infrastructure oiled.”

“With many leading financial organisations as customers, SAVVIS has a wide range of experience serving the information technology needs of the financial services industry,” said Richard Warley, international managing director at SAVVIS. “The outsourced solution will provide Augustus with the flexibility to expand and change as the business grows and we look forward to working alongside the company as this happens.”

About SAVVIS

SAVVIS Inc. is a global leader in managed IT infrastructure services for business applications. With an IT services platform spanning North America, Europe and Asia, SAVVIS leads the industry in delivering secure, reliable and scalable hosting, network and application services. These solutions enable customers to focus on their core business while SAVVIS ensures the quality of their IT systems and operations. SAVVIS’ strategic approach combines virtualisation technology, a global network and 30 data centres and automated management and provisioning systems. For more information about SAVVIS, visit www.savvis.co.uk or www.savvis.net.