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Osborne Celebrates Winning its First IT Accolade at European Awards

The Osborne Information Technology (IT) team and Onwave partnership have won Best Networking Project of the Year 2015 at the Computer Weekly European User Awards.

Onwave has a successful on-going partnership with Osborne to improve IT access for its construction sites to critical information technology resources. Osborne are an early adopter of streamlining technologies to help the construction process, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), thin client and virtualisation.

Originally Osborne covered the connectivity gap by providing 3G dongles, 3G routers, or wired Broadband.
Phil Gilbey, Head of IT at Osborne explains “Where possible, we would install ADSL connectivity, but the lead times on lines are unpredictable and could be anything from a few weeks to several months. These delays and uncertainties add significant frustration and cost to projects.”

In the past, Osborne has tested out technologies such as satellite and running their own multi SIM 3G routers but these options had significant complexity and cost drawbacks. “Our industry is increasingly reliant on information technology to make sure that all building information is current and available on site” explains Gilbey, “Delays in getting up-to-date information to our site teams can be very costly. Having a reliable IP connection from the site to our data centre is critical.”

Onwave’s solution takes a selection of the latest and most appropriate connectivity services at every site and bonds these connections into a single managed service. This provides greater resilience, security and reliability. If a single connection fails the bonded network keeps by combining multiple services (Fttc, xDSL, 4G, Satellite).  This service is designed to match the services available at each specific site and is installed quickly (less than a week) scaling bandwidth to match demand or delivery timescales.

Feedback from the judges on the win for the partnership was: “This was a well thought-out project that displays clear savings. It shows Osborne to be innovative, original in its ideas and committed to getting it done right.”
IT connectivity is also essential to meet the UK government mandated use of BIM on centrally-funded projects by 2016.

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