We recently asked Gloucestershire County Council’s Transport Technology Officer Nick Bauer about his experience of having the council’s transport technology hosted by Trapeze. Here’s what he had to say…
On the overall difference:
- “With our former supplier, our RTPI server used to live in IT; now it is remotely hosted and we access it via the Internet. The main difference is that I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
- “Hosting locally was a nightmare. Issues meant a convoluted process whereby our IT team and the supplier would try to establish whose responsibility it was. And when the supplier’s engineer turned up, IT wouldn’t want them to touch the technology. It could take two days just to get ownership of the problem – and all the while our system had an issue, so was damaging our ability to meet our obligations to the public.”
- “Now the technology and support are all owned by one organisation, so if we have an issue I know Trapeze will deal with it.”
On IT teams:
- “Internal IT teams are understandably cautious, but this can cause problems for those of us trying to use the technology. Hosting externally removes the risk, which allows me to get on with doing my job.”
- “We’re charged hourly by our internal IT team, so hosting locally meant we had to pay two support teams for upgrades.”
On security:
- “I have no concerns; none at all. Our IT team accept it’s safe too.”
On remote working:
- “I use the system remotely all the time. I work from home when I need to, and often log in from meetings – for example to show a bus operator something on the system. I even logged in on my phone once.”
Would you recommend?
- “I would absolutely recommend a hosted approach. It offers greater flexibility and frees up my time for the job I should be doing, instead of being stuck in the middle of an argument between two different organisations.”
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