Feb, 2004 : VIA Secures Contract with UK Accountants

📅 February 18, 2004 - VIA NET.WORKS (vianetworks.com) said on Tuesday that it has won a two-year contract to host and manage a data-driven site for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (icaew.co.uk) and its 125,000 members.

VIA, a provider of business communications solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises, was awarded the contract following a competitive tender process against six other companies.
"Our site is a business critical part of the Institute's operation," said ICAEW Web development manager, Chris Leicester. "We were impressed by the total solution that VIA offered. The solution was customized to address our very specific needs. They not only fulfilled our technical requirements but also put forward customer service focused features that gave us a greater level of transparency over the whole service. We were also impressed with the way VIA conducted the whole planning and implementation of the project to time and budget."
The ICAEW's site posts Accountancy qualifications examination results five times a year, resulting in sudden extreme peaks in Web page requests. The site also offers online registration for membership; application for exams; a recruitment section allowing CVs to be uploaded and vacancies posted and special offer subscriptions.
To ensure site performance does not degrade during peak demand periods, VIA says, the site is replicated and hosted across four managed hosting servers with requests routed between them using Alteon Web switches. The hosting solution has been designed to cater for one million page impressions per month, with headroom capacity and performance to handle double the specified load.