A composite story about a 90-seat office, four separate internet suppliers, and what consolidation actually got the client.

When we picked up the managed-services contract, the first hour I spent in the comms cupboard was the most informative hour of the engagement. The client, a financial-services firm of about 90 people across two adjoining buildings in central London, had four separate internet supplier contracts. Two were primary lines into the main building. One was a dedicated leased line going to a single trading desk on the third floor. The fourth was a fibre going into the smaller building next door, with its own router and its own firewall (the firewall is the device that filters network traffic going in and out).

Each contract had been signed in a different year by a different person responding to a different problem. Each had renewed itself. None had been reviewed against the others. The total monthly spend across the four was somewhere between £3,400 and £3,800, depending on which month you looked at.

What looked like the scope

The brief from the new operations director was simple. “Cut the suppliers. We’ve got four bills, four support numbers, and when something breaks nobody owns it.” He’d been in post for three months and had spent the first one chasing a phantom outage that turned out to be a routing issue between two of the four suppliers, neither of whom would accept ownership of the problem.

We agreed the headline goal: consolidate to a primary supplier with a backup line, one router, one firewall, one number to call when something breaks. The phrase he used was “one throat to choke.” The phrase we used internally was less colourful but meant the same thing.

We scoped six weeks. Audit the four contracts, surface the actual usage on each line, design the consolidated topology, procure, install, cut over, decommission. We assumed the trading-desk leased line would probably stay (those things exist for a reason) and that the rest could collapse into a single primary plus a 4G or sub-fibre backup.

What actually showed up

At the audit pass the story changed. The two “primary” lines into the main building were both load-balanced, sort of. The load-balancer was a piece of hardware that had been installed in 2019 by a contractor and never reconfigured. One of the two lines was actually dormant. It was costing about £600 a month and carrying almost no traffic. The other was doing all the real work.

The trading-desk leased line was the one that genuinely needed to stay. It had a 99.99% SLA and a four-hour fix commitment. The trading desk’s compliance requirements were specific about latency and dedicated bandwidth. We weren’t going to touch it.

The fibre into the smaller building turned out to be doing two jobs: providing internet to about a dozen people in that building, and acting as the inter-building link for a set of shared file servers that nobody had documented as living in the smaller building. The shared servers were on a separate VLAN (a way of slicing one physical network into separate logical ones) that crossed between the buildings via the fibre. If we’d cut the fibre and replaced it with a wireless point-to-point or a back-route through the main building, we’d have broken the shared file access for both sides.

There was also a fifth supplier we hadn’t been told about. A 4G failover dongle sitting on a cabinet in reception, plugged into the firewall, with a SIM contract someone in finance was paying about £40 a month for. It turned out to be a leftover from an office move in 2022 that had been “temporary” for nearly four years.

How we handled it

We re-baselined the design. One primary leased line with a 99.9% SLA and four-hour fix, sized for combined peak load plus 30% headroom. One 4G failover built into the new edge router (the legacy dongle went in the bin). The trading-desk leased line stayed, contractually and physically separate, because compliance wanted it that way. A new wired link between the two buildings was ordered on the same primary contract, and the inter-building VLAN moved onto it.

Procurement took longer than the technical work. The leased-line install was eleven weeks from order to handover. We ran the four legacy contracts in parallel until the new line was stable, then decommissioned them in sequence over a fortnight. The trading desk barely noticed. The rest of the office noticed the cutover weekend and a slightly different captive-portal page on Monday.

What changed and what didn’t

The bill came down. Combined monthly spend across the consolidated estate dropped to roughly £1,800-£2,000, depending on usage. That’s a meaningful saving, call it 40-45%, but it wasn’t the main reason to do the work.

The main reason was the thing the operations director had asked for. One supplier to call. One firewall to configure. One set of monitoring credentials. When something went wrong over the following twelve months, and things went wrong twice, both times for under an hour, there was no question of who owned it.

What didn’t change, interestingly, was perceived speed. The legacy estate had been mostly fine on day-to-day throughput. The new line was technically faster on the test rig, but most users didn’t notice, and the win was never going to be speed; it was clarity.

What we’d do differently

The audit pass should have been more thorough on undocumented hardware. The 4G dongle in reception was a small thing, but it was a small thing nobody knew about, plugged into the production firewall. We’ve extended our onboarding checklist for managed-services takeovers to include a physical walk of every comms cupboard, reception desk, and cabinet, with a photo and a label.

We should also have surfaced the inter-building VLAN earlier. Catching it in week three pushed the leased-line order back a fortnight, and that fortnight stretched the project by three weeks at the back end. Assume any second site is doing more than it looks like, and check.

Practical lessons

A few things worth carrying into any supplier-consolidation project:

  • Count the suppliers physically, not contractually. Walk every cupboard. Photograph every router, dongle, modem, and unlabelled box with a blinking light. Reconcile against the contract list. There will be at least one item that doesn’t match.
  • Audit usage before you cut. A primary line that turns out to be dormant is common. So is a backup that’s been carrying the load for years because the primary died and nobody noticed.
  • Some lines genuinely need to stay separate. Trading desks, healthcare links, point-of-sale, building-management systems. Don’t roll them up just because the spreadsheet looks cleaner.
  • The headline saving isn’t usually the point. Cost reduction is the easy number to put in the case for change. The real benefit is operational: one supplier, one number, one accountable party when something breaks.
  • Procurement timelines dominate the project plan. The technical work is days. The leased-line lead time is months. Order early.

Where Managed Services sits

Consolidation projects are where Managed Services earns the relationship. Once the estate’s tidy, with one supplier, one firewall, one monitoring view, the day-to-day support is dramatically easier. We can see what’s going on, we know who to call, and we can spot a problem before the client does, which is the practice doing its job in steady state.

If you’ve inherited a tangle of legacy contracts and you’re tired of nobody owning the problem when it lands, that’s our Managed Services practice. We’ll unwind the supplier sprawl, consolidate to a single accountable view of the estate, and stay in the relationship so the day-to-day support gets dramatically easier. Drop us a note at info@jmopartners.co.uk and we’ll start the conversation.

JMO|Partners · Enterprise IT, sized for SMEs.