Royal London Asset Management expects to save about £75,000 in IT costs by deploying virtualisation across its two City datacentres.

The implementation of VMware systems at the server rooms, which will reduce the number of computers from 35 to eight, is expected to bring the savings over a five-year period and provide a return on investment within three years.

According to the firm, the rollout, carried out by reseller Kelway, was prompted by limited space in the server rooms, which restricted their potential to support future growth.

“We intend to reduce the number of physical servers by almost three-quarters, which will provide us with room to grow and support future business development as well as delivering significant cost savings,” said Dennis Leeks, IT manager at Royal London.

“The flexibility of procuring a new server in an hour means we can be much more agile as a department and support the rest of the business in a more responsive way,” said Leeks.

“In today’s climate, businesses need to be able to make quick decisions in order to remain competitive and IT needs to have the infrastructure in place to support those decisions,” he said.