Case Study: Austin-Smith:Lord achieves increased productivity and reduced costs with Panzura Freedom Collaboration

Accelerating Project Outcomes for UK Architecture Practice

Austin‑Smith:Lord is a British architecture and design practice with studios in Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, London and Glasgow that needed staff across locations to collaborate on the same project files in real time. Aging hardware and software, slow file access when multiple users worked on the same job, and lengthy disaster‑recovery tests were hampering productivity and business goals.

With help from Excitech, A‑S:L deployed Panzura Freedom Collaboration on refreshed hardware and Amazon S3 in 2018, giving a single cloud copy, byte‑range locking to prevent overwrites, and near‑zero latency between offices. The result: seamless real‑time collaboration, greater staffing flexibility, faster disaster recovery and simplified data management—cutting costs by up to 70% and noticeably improving productivity.

Austin-Smith: Lord

David Price

IT Manager