Article-conco

Local system integrator three6five’s Advanced Infrastructure Management (AIM) service offering continues to provide significant benefits to Consolidated Power Projects (Pty) Ltd (CONCO), after several years in operation.

The CONCO Group is Africa’s largest power infrastructure service provider with three decades of Africa-wide experience in transmission, distribution and power infrastructure development. The Midrand-based company provides high voltage turnkey solution to a multitude of customers across the African continent and the Middle East. CONCO has offices in Midrand, Cape Town and Durban, as well as in Mauritius, Namibia and Botswana, and three6five is responsible for the management of the entire internal network.

“Consolidated Power Projects (Pty) Ltd, has been one of three6five’s customers for the last few years and in this time have built-up a good business partnership. In these past few years, I have been able to work with a lot of the three6five team, being on projects or occasional infrastructure monitoring issues or support,” says Andrew Johnston, IT Manager at CONCO. 

“three6five is a reliable one stop network shop. They have exceptionally professional, industry leading skills and resources across the board, who have helped us to steer our networking infrastructure plans toward best practice methodologies, whilst still keeping it relevant to our business needs and costs,” he adds.

three6five’s AIM assists with the operational management of a customer’s IP network. This enables the customer to focus on its core business, instead of having to worry about the operational and business impact of poor network performance. 

“The network is completely stable and has been for some years now,” says Wentzel Koen, technical team leader for CONCO from three6five. “Our longstanding relationship with CONCO has meant that we have been able to build the network from the ground up, using top quality infrastructure products from Cisco, Juniper, Ruckus and Fortinet.”

three6five manages CONCO’s enterprise network’s routing, switching and security. The head office network is a full three tier network with core, distribution and WAN edge redundancy. 

All five remote branches have local internet breakout and encrypted tunnels to access head office and Microsoft Azure resources. For wireless, all branches make use of Ruckus Access Points with a combination of Ruckus Unleash and Zone Director management.

 “We feel that three6five can be completely relied upon to keep us up and running with the absolute minimum down time – twenty-four seven, three sixty five, which is of paramount importance to our organisation,” says Johnston.