Mitchells & Butlers heads for the cloud

Pub operator Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) aims to cut the costs of its IT and telephony by extending its outsourcing agreement with IT services firm Fujitsu.

M&B – owner of high street chains such as All Bar One and Browns – will migrate its server estate to a private cloud run by Fujitsu.

Flexibility has become the watchword for company IT systems to support its ambitious expansion plans for the coming years, said Robin Young, commercial director at M&B.

“Over the past year, we’ve refocused our core business to generate greater revenues in food, and plan further expansion over the coming months. We require an agile IT infrastructure to underpin that growth,” said Mike Sackman, chief information officer at M&B.

As part of the transition to a cloud service, M&B will run IT applications on Fijitsu’s virtualised servers, housed in the service provider's data centres close to London.

Fujitsu will also provide M&B with a hosted telephony service which will connect its head offices to its retail outlets.

Earlier this year, M&B undertook a strategic review of its IT suppliers, which resulted in it plumping for Fujitsu as its key technology partner.

Fujitsu, which had previously supported M&B’s tills, replaced IBM as the main IT service provider.