Managed hosting company’s data centre infrastructure supports growth of Smart technology 

Smart media company Ecebs is to take advantage of the skills and experience of Scottish Digital IT Company of the Year iomart Hosting, to supply Tyne and Wear’s transport authority, Nexus, with the ability to process thousands of smartcard transactions each day.   

Nexus is the first concessionary pass issuing authority in the North East of England to put a Smart processing system in place and will use Ecebs’ Paragon HOPS (Host Operator Processing System).

Ecebs’ technology already forms the backbone of Smart travel in the UK as Ecebs monitors all Smart payment transactions on behalf of the UK’s standardisation body, ITSO.

The system will be hosted by iomart Hosting and will validate and record passengers’ journeys using Smart technology such as cards or phones.

David Burdett, Managing Director of Ecebs, commented: “We have recently won a number of projects that take advantage of our scalable Paragon HOPS technology to deliver efficiency savings and reduce fraud. We felt the support of a specialist hosting company with its own infrastructure, able to grow quickly along with the needs of our clients, was the best way to deliver a technology platform which matched our software capabilities.

iomart Hosting has a great reputation for service and we are looking forward to a close working relationship as the growth in Smart technology continues across the UK.”

Ecebs’ Paragon HOPS includes a vast array of processing and management capabilities and is set to become the backbone of Oyster style travel in Scotland following a recent deal with Strathclyde Partnership for Travel (SPT) to deliver contactless payments across all forms of travel in the SPT region.

iomart Hosting managing director Sarah Haran said: “iomart Hosting already has significant expertise in helping transport organisations deliver greener and smarter travel to the public so we are delighted to be helping Ecebs with the smartcard project for Nexus. With our guaranteed service levels, Ecebs is free to concentrate on the development and delivery of the Paragon HOPS, knowing that their IT infrastructure is in safe hands.

Information security is a key issue around the delivery of this project. The fact that our all our data centres carry the ISO: 27001 standard gives Ecebs and Nexus peace of mind when it comes to managing the data on the smartcards for thousands of commuters.” 

iomart Hosting will deliver a secure hybrid server and network infrastructure leveraging their virtualisation expertise and provide a 24/7 fully managed service desk in support of Eceb’s objectives for service performance and availability. As part of the architecture, Ecebs will also benefit from iomart Hosting’s flexible managed colocation services, supporting custom smartcard reader shelves with the hosting company’s on-site staff operating card-reader swap-outs on request.

iomart Hosting is a subsidiary of iomart Group plc which is ranked as one of the top 25 cloud services providers in the world by Talkin’ Cloud 50 and is a finalist in the National Business Awards 2011 in partnership with Orange.