Refuelling Solutions drives into the cloud for scalability

As refuelling management services provider, Refuelling Solutions, continues to see ongoing growth, the company needed to find the right third party service provider to manage its existing cloud infrastructure and desktop applications, and has selected ITonCloud for the job.

Refuelling Solutions general manager Greg Strom told ZDNet the main aim was to find a service provider that would be able to manage the company's IT infrastructure to keep pace with the changes and growth of the business.

"We've traditionally grown 20 percent year-on-year, which is significant in anybody's term and as a result, the focus has got to be on the business, rather than IT," he said.

"We have a saying at Refuelling Solutions where our strategy is to be information providers and information managers for the petroleum industry and customers in Australia, but we're not an IT company."

ITonCloud overtakes the job of another third party provider that was servicing Refuelling Solutions for the last five years. Strom explained that the unnamed company was acquired by a larger company, and therefore the service it was initially providing to Refuelling Solutions eventually diminished, which triggered their search for another provider.

ITonCloud is now responsible not only managing the company's desktop applications, including Outlook and helpdesk, it's also responsible for managing the data flow collected from Refuelling Solutions' in-truck touch-PC computers installed in its fleet of 174 vehicles, regarding fuel transaction cycles for and on behalf of customers. Transactions are captured from the trucks, uploaded into the backend systems via a 3G mobile network, and generate reports for customers in the rail, marine, and bio-fuel sectors.

"The data flow from the office to the truck and the truck to the office will be managed through the GPS network, giving us a whole lot of additional information to help us manage our own fleet more effectively," said Strom, noting ITonCloud is helping deliver a "very strong, flexibile, and scalable IT architecture".

While the concept of cloud was not new to the company, Strom described the move from the previous cloud infrastructure and into ITonCloud was an "anxious" time.

"Being so reliant on this third party provider, ITonCloud told us they'll take the old system and bring it across to theirs, but at the same time upgrades were happening, so it was a fairly big job to do at the same time, so there was a lot of anxiety then," he said.

"But these guys were brilliant because they made it happen quite seamlessly when they shut down our systems at 4pm on a Friday, and when we came in on Monday everything was up and running again."

Strom said the cloud infrastructure is core in developing the company's 10-year IT strategy that will "help take the business into the future".

"We took out entire IT platform out five years ago, and that took about three years with the assistance of Microsoft to put in a new backend system that would allow us to develop a customer relationship manager system.

"With the entirely new strategy structural environment, we also need somebody that glues all that together, so that's when we looked for a hosted cloud provider," he said.

In addition, the company is developing a web-enabled system, called iFuel, where customers can track transactions in real-time. 

"It's all about customers getting access to all sorts of information in respect to fuel costs and fuel usage. iFuel will help that information flow as we are a provider of information for them," Strom said.