major financial HQ (London)

IKM appointed infrastructure partner for major Computacenter Canary Wharf Project. Allnet, now known as Computacenter Services, is part of the Computacenter Group, and was originally founded in 2002. As one of Europe's leading independent providers of IT infrastructure services, it oversees a range of managed and support services contracts as well as implementing transformation projects for major corporate and government organisations. With service offerings extending from users' desktops to organisations' network infrastructure and datacentres, Computacenter Services recorded £267 million of revenue in 2005 and employs approximately 3,500 staff across the UK.

Assessment

Allnet required an infrastructure partner who had the necessary experience to deploy state of the art cabling infrastructure within a multi trade fit out environment., IKM, who had established a strong relationship with Allnet over the previous five years were selected and during the three project lifecycle were able to make serious contributions to both reducing the overall expenditure and the duration of installation time by pre terminating all 50,000 Category 6 cables away from site.

Project

This project involved the complete fitting out of the 13 Floors of the building. IKM’s remit was to install terminate and test both the voice multicore copper and fibre backbone which was some 600 individual cables in total. The three main dealer floors had in excess of 8,000 Category 6 outlets each, with looms being manufactured in up to 10 cables per desk position. In addition to this IKM also provided an AV solution to a number of specific rooms involved in this project, including a 250 seat fully interactive auditorium.

The horizontal element of the project was undertaken by manufacturing off-site pre loomed groups of cables. The manufactured looms were delivered to site on purpose made trolleys and were installed under-floor outside normal working ensuring that the floor was exposed for the absolute minimum time. This saved other contractors on site downtime while also ensuring the very tight timeframes were successfully achieved.

Paying tribute to the IKM Team, IKM Managing Director Innes Masson said:

“The building was fully completed in February 2008 and is the largest ever single building infrastructure project undertaken by IKM. It is a stunning testament to the skills, dedication and continuity of the team involved to achieve this successfully and to an exceptionally high standard from the start to the finish more than three years later.”

Benefits

IKM were able to cut the amount of time previously allowed for the installation from the traditional 4 weeks to just 1 week per floor. As cables were pre tested at one end prior to arriving at site the testing time was also dramatically reduced. In addition to the time saved whilst on site the environmental benefits achieved by preparing looms off site were quite considerable.

Websites: http://computacenter.com/services/connectivity-solutions/default.asp