Key results
The company
Barton Peveril Sixth Form College
barton-peveril.ac.ukSixth form college for A Level and vocational education for 16-19 year olds.
Result highlights
- ~350 IT hours saved during peak periods
The story
One of the UK's largest sixth-form colleges serves over 5,000 students, previously relying on on-premises servers to support its "outstanding" rated educational programs.
A sudden 500% increase in server licensing costs forced an urgent migration, while students struggled to navigate fragmented systems for basic information like timetables. The college needed to unify these disparate data sources and modernize infrastructure before licenses expired in nine months.
The college migrated to Google Cloud and deployed custom Vertex AI agents that query internal records and external bus schedules via APIs. A "red team" of students and staff aggressively tested the models for safety risks before the system went live. Real-time guardrails now flag sensitive queries to safeguarding leads while serving answers through a secure browser interface.
Quotes
“SoftwareOne understood us, our context, and our objectives, and helped us streamline our migration to Google Cloud for better security, reduced operational costs, and an improved ability to build a digital ecosystem that fuels AI.”
Implementation partner
SoftwareOne
softwareone.comManaged Barton Peveril's infrastructure migration to Google Cloud and provided managed services.