Claranet Polishes Up Peugeot Cars To Help Out Children In Need

Managed services provider (MSP) Claranet teamed up with car maker Peugeot in October to host a charity web microsite encouraging kids to join the “UK’s Largest Car Wash” event, held to raise money for BBC’s Children in Need. The charity appeal hits the TV screens today and the website is braced for its share of traffic to rocket.

Peugeot first held the fundraising drive in 2012 inviting customers to “Get Sudsy with Pudsey”. This year, to improve support for the charity event, Peugeot turned to its new cloud partner Claranet to host a scalable, standalone website. The site is run on Claranet’s IaaS platform, the Virtual Data Centre.

Give us your sodden money

The microsite went live in October, was officially launched by celebrity Peter Andre (pictured) earlier this month, and runs through to December. It is a fully interactive portal through which supporters can find and organise local charity car washes, learn about the project and, most importantly, donate money.

Steven Fahey, PR manager at Peugeot, said, “Our online presence and digital communications strategy is central to our fundraising work with Children in Need. Without a fully operational and reliable website for the campaign, we would risk missing out on important donations and support for the charity, something that we couldn’t risk.”

He added that, due to the nature of the campaign, traffic to the site could change rapidly.

“This meant that we needed a hosting partner that could handle these demands and keep the site running smoothly. Having worked with Claranet since the start of this year, we had seen their Virtual Data Centre service in action, and knew that they would be the right provider for this project.”

Claranet’s cloud platform (VDC) is designed to handle the sudden surges of activity that are part of campaigns like Children in Need. The platform gives Peugeot the ability to scale the site to their needs, to cope with times of peak demand, while the resilience of the service ensures the highest levels of availability and uptime are maintained.

Michel Robert, Claranet UK’s managing director, explained, “Claranet’s cloud platform ensures that Peugeot’s microsite can cope with spikes in traffic, which are driven by calls to action on the Children in Need programme.”

“Working with the team at Peugeot, Claranet can work out the likely impact of planned programmes and advertising schedules, and dynamically increase compute capacity to meet peak traffic,” he said. “Corporate social responsibility and charities hold an important place in our company ethos, so we are delighted to be able to participate alongside Peugeot to support such an important and worthwhile cause.”