The Shire of Esperance in Western Australia has gone live on the new Civica cloud platform launched last month.

The Civica cloud platform, located in the Sydney Equinix data centre, delivers all of the Shire’s IT strategic applications, including the Civica Authority Enterprise Suite which enables users to share and update data on a real time basis, eliminating redundant data and the need to manage integration of components and batch processing of updates.

The Shire of Esperance is one of Civica’s largest and most sophisticated cloud customers with over 180 active users.  Civica hosts and manages 15 council applications for the Shire including Authority Enterprise Suite, HP TRIM, Cadcorp, Amlib, Infocouncil, Microsoft Office & Exchange, and Symantec Enterprise Vault.  The company also manages a fleet of 44 printers and 3.5TBs of data, including 400GB of email.

The Civica cloud platform is based on Citrix technology and the FlexPod infrastructure which is powered by Cisco, NetApp and VMware technology.  This infrastructure provides a highly scalable, highly virtualised, secure multi-tenanted delivery platform for all business critical IT needs. 

Sean Kenny, Shire of Esperance IT Manager, said, “Since moving to the new Civica cloud we have noticed a major improvement to the user and performance experience.  This is a major step forward in our ability to better service the community while the Civica team were also very responsive to our requirements which helped result in a smooth migration.”

The Shire of Esperance cloud migration project was staged during the course of a weekend enabling Civica and the council’s IT team to test and verify the applications with no disruption to Council business.

Michael Preedy, Managing Director – Local Government Solutions, Civica, said, “Local government organisations today are under increasing pressure to improve service delivery whilst keeping costs down. Senior management and ICT professionals recognise the crucial role technology can play to support everything from streamlining back office to improving community services for ratepayers.  

“Our new cloud offering will provide local government with all the benefits of an integrated, enterprise solution capable of providing consistent, accurate data to all parts of the organisation while at the same time mitigating risk by utilising the latest technology data centre infrastructure backed by Equinix.”