Civica is a global GovTech leader, with operations in the UK and Ireland, APAC and North America. Through its commitment to turning ideas into action, they help over 2.5 million professionals deliver the public services of the future, every day.
Civica MarkManager, enables reliable, secure, on-screen marking for exam candidates around the world. Part of the market leading Civica Assessments platform, it delivers marking of high-volume paper-based assessments and enables organisations to effectively and reliably set and uphold the standard of their mark schemes – while maintaining high quality assurance measures.
Business challenges
Civica required a Managed Services Provider (MSP) who could host the IBM i series securely, ensure the highest standard of business continuity, take on the associated risk and increase capacity as their business demands grew. A top priority for the partnership was ensuring that the Civica team had the systems and resources in place to roll out a three-year long project for one of its key customers (a global education organisation) to ensure its global marking workforce could seamlessly access candidate responses around the clock.
The solution
Frontline migrated the MarkManager application from Power 8 8286 to Power 9080 scale UP server. The migration also included moving the data to a higher capacity storage array and configuring storage replication with PowerHA. Included in the work was the setup and testing of Disaster Recovery (DR) and the backups using flash copy. The configuration work and cutover were all carried out remotely due to the COVID lock down. The migration and cutover was carried out smoothly by the team using the technology at hand to ensure the workload could carry on where it left prior to the cutover.
Outcomes
• Increased capacity and storage
• Better performance
• Allowed their customer to increase assessment reviews from 50,000 candidate assessments to over 2.5 million a year
‘Our partnership with the Frontline team has been open and transparent from day one. We receive a great level of support from the Service Desk team around the clock, which is integral when issues can be logged by our customer 24/7. Frontline has the in-house expertise to ensure our systems are kept up to date, secure and reliable.’ Emma Hall, Sales & Implementation Director – Civica
