About Peach Pubs

The Peach Pub Company was established in 2002 with a vision to make great individual places to eat, drink and sleep.  It has grown to become a £17 million, award-winning success story in an increasingly challenging industry. Success has been built on sourcing good food, caring for the environment, supporting local enterprise, enjoying life and having fun while they work.

Peach Pubs work hard at creating the best pubs in Britain’s market towns – the best experience, the best food and drink, and the best service – literally the best in town.  The IT infrastructure plays an important role in delivering this vision to its customers.

The challenge

With a clear direction and an ambitious growth plan from day one, Peach Pubs required a scalable IT solution that would enable them to manage costs effectively. The solution needed to be flexible enough to facilitate rapid deployment of the entire IT infrastructure required for a new pub to start trading easily.  Peach Pubs need access to key skills but didn’t want a complex and costly IT infrastructure and team that would require capital expenditure and become costly to manage and maintain.

"We cannot afford any part of the supply chain to go wrong.” Hamish Stoddart, Peach Pubs   Hamish Stoddart, co-founder of Peach Pubs described the challenge they faced: “IT is difficult for start-ups, especially nine years ago. At the beginning we didn’t even have our own office but we required the ability to easily set-up the IT for new properties while keeping the costs down. The ability to deliver our vision is dependent not only on us but also our suppliers. We cannot afford any part of the supply chain to go wrong.”

Peach Pubs demand that all suppliers embrace their culture, vision and values.  This imperative informs supplier selection and ensures quality is delivered.

The solution

Netential was selected as Peach Pubs’ IT partner from the beginning and helped devise and deliver a progressive and dynamic IT strategy that Peach Pubs’ culture, vision and values demanded. Netential pioneered a cloud computing solution, whereby computers at pubs could easily access the necessary applications, files and resources it needed via the internet. Deploying remote desktops has multiple advantages over traditional LAN architecture and allowed Netential to configure the entire IT required for a new pub quickly and with little effort and minimal cost.

Netential selected an appropriate data centre to host all the applications and software required to run Peach Pubs effectively.  They implemented backup, resilience, business continuity and risk management policy and procedures to ensure quality is delivered – even in the event of a disaster. Netential also act as a virtual IT department managing, maintaining and providing first line support for the hosted software applications to ensure that everything works and the customers’ experience is second to none.

Stoddart added: “Netential has been with us since day one and has played an important role in the success of Peach Pubs. Between us we have transformed our IT infrastructure. Netential brought with them professionalism, this is crucial when a retail restaurant strives to be the best. IT keeps us alive so all elements of IT must work – Netential keep on top of everything and make sure that we don’t let our customers down.”

"IT keeps us alive so all elements of IT must work – Netential keep on top of everything and make sure that we don’t let our customers down.” Hamish Stoddart, Peach Pubs

Netential enable Peach Pubs to have a physical presence without the cost or employment risk. This combined with being able to tap into Netential’s wide range of skills has huge benefit for Peach Pubs. Stoddart continued; “Over the years we have grown up together, Netential take responsibility and has a great mix of skills from strategic to technical.  They are progressive and forward-thinking but they also make sure that the printers work; this end-to-end commitment is unique.”

The future

Peach Pubs will continue to invest in the right IT infrastructure. Working in collaboration with Netential they have devised a new solution to support the growth strategy over the next three years. Longer term the team is looking to move toward a Google Apps solution as they continue to innovate and pioneer new IT strategy to ensure they continue to thrive and deliver the very best service for their customers.