London – April 20, 2010 – Attenda Limited, the Always On Managed Services company, today announced that it has signed a contract with building materials company CEMEX UK, to provide operational managed services for its business critical UK Legacy SAP system.

CEMEX is a global building materials company and leading supplier of cement, ready-mixed concrete and aggregates. In the UK, CEMEX also provides asphalt, roof tiles, concrete block solutions and railway sleepers. The company generates over £1 billion in annual sales and has a UK supply network with over 500 locations to ensure that quality building materials is available to customers locally. CEMEX is dedicated to building a better future and couples financial achievements with a firm commitment to sustainable development.

CEMEX selected Attenda in a competitive tendering process to replace its existing outsourcing arrangement with a more flexible commercial contract that would reduce costs. The goal was to provide the capability to ‘right-size’ the infrastructure and service level for its UK Legacy SAP environment, to match the reduced number of users, whilst retaining functionality for the users and providing access to historical data for legal and audit reasons.

As Erwin Von Doelling, Head of IT Services for CEMEX Shared Services of EMEA & Asia explains, “The cost of our existing outsourcing arrangement was disproportionate to the number of users on this legacy platform.” He continues, “We needed to provision for a low risk, scalable infrastructure as a service for our UK Legacy SAP system, in order to avoid unnecessary CAPEX investment and to provide greater commercial flexibility for the future.”   

In the contract, Attenda is managing the infrastructure solution for CEMEX’s UK Legacy SAP environment, including production, QA and Development systems, with interfaces to other CEMEX systems. The Attenda solution has delivered cost reductions, through re-sizing of the infrastructure, whilst still retaining a dual centre design for disaster recovery.

The Attenda solution is built upon its Cloud Computing platform, Attenda RTI, which has enabled CEMEX to rapidly migrate across to the Attenda data centres. The solution has required minimal testing by CEMEX’s own IT staff and user base during the transaction and go-live period, with all of the interfaces to other CEMEX systems retained and fully tested. The infrastructure solution includes integrated disaster recovery capability, restoring the production system within 24 hours, matching CEMEX’s recovery time objectives within its Business Continuity Plan.

Von Doelling concludes, “The Attenda SAP managed service is providing our CEMEX operations in the UK with a cost effective, high availability infrastructure solution for our UK Legacy SAP system, acting as an extension to our own SAP application resources in the UK, and delivering the business agility and commercial flexibility that we require for this SAP infrastructure moving forward.”