State-owned valuation and property information company Quotable Value (QV) has signed a seven-figure contract with Revera.

Revera will provide fully managed IT infrastructure as part of the five-year plan. In the process of switching, QV has already saved 20% on its IT operational expenditure, allowing reduced capital spend.

QV’s production, storage and disaster recovery systems, including more than 100 servers, have been relocated to Revera’s data centers in Auckland and Wellington, where they will eventually be virtualised. The new system is expected to be fully operational by March.

As part of the transition from physical ownership to a contract-based virtualised infrastructure, Revera purchased all QV hardware, including servers, storage and desktops.

The agreement also supports QV’s trans-Tasman operations, which includes 250 desktops in 35 sites.

QV General Manager Jacquie Barker said, “We knew we had to sharpen up our act and faced significant capital expenditure to get us where we needed to be.”

She added: “We wanted speed and flexibility, but faced huge roadblocks. When we wanted to do things invariably we had to buy a new server, which required board papers and CAPEX. By the time we’d secured the extra capacity, our needs had often changed.”

In addition to hardware limitations, growth was a factor in the change as QV recently acquired property services company DTZ and has plans to merge it with the existing Darroch brand.

Barker said she the initial 20% cost savings proposition was staggering and said, “Owning the cake simply doesn’t compete with renting a slice.”