Proactive makes sense in a competitive market

April 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We heard this morning that Adventi have gone. This is clearly a blow both for the industry and especially for Adventi’s customers. We would really like to wish all the staff at Adventi the best. For the company’s customers, just as we did very successfully at the beginning of the year when RFL Group also went down, we will be happy to provide short term support in a variety of ways while you work out what you are going to do and who is best suited for your long term IT needs.

On a more positive note we’ve noticed a lot of activity in the Glasgow IT support market, with more and more companies looking for a something a that works a bit more in line with their business needs. In most cases we are being told that the traditional support models, where it gets fixed only after its broken, is costing companies too much in lost productivity and revenue, especially when they are under constant pressure from their customers to deliver better service. One new customer told us that while an hour with a server down is just about bearable, the knock on effect on their ability to deliver service to their customers equates to about a working day. In a highly competitive, aggressive market our customer cannot afford that luxury.

We’ve always known that proactive IT support is the right way to maintain something, but we had not worked through just how much the knock on effect of just an hour’s downtime is on a business. It’s also really refreshing to meet a company that really understands the value of its IT to the business. It’s even nicer to be the Glasgow IT support company they chose because, in their considered and we think expert opinion, we deliver the best IT support for their needs.

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Adventi IT Support – What does the future hold?

April 20, 2010 By 2 Comments

More bad news this week for jobs in Scotland which is disappointing to say the least.

One of the firms making the news was the IT support company Adventi (made up of Adventi, Scotsys and Integral Arm) who are based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Bellshill which went in to administration on Thursday.

Whilst the company is still trading as they look for a buyer, they have cut staff numbers by 50% from 44 to 22.

The administrators are very optimistic on finding a buyer and hopefully they can secure this very soon to enable the business to take care of its IT support commitments.

It’s crucial that as many companies as possible continue to trade to protect their Clients and to provide quality competition in the Scottish marketplace which in reality, is fairly small in real terms.

There are many comments in the news that it was the VAT office inflexibility which precipitated the administration, however, the £500k loss a year or two earlier may also have been a particularly significant factor.

There are many IT companies in Scotland and England looking to take advantage of the situation in various ways, however, I personally hope Adventi can continue in whatever form and provide uninterrupted service to their Clients.

We wish the team at Adventi all the best in the coming days and months (particularly those who are looking for new jobs ).

Links to various news articles:

http://business.scotsman.com/industry/Adventi-goes-into-administration.6233993.jp

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7100715.ece

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8626033.stm

http://www.heraldscotland.com/business/corporate-sme/administrators-take-over-at-adventi-as-new-buyer-sought-1.1021292

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National Server Downtime Day

April 6, 2010 By 2 Comments

Have you heard about the new public holiday being enjoyed by office workers all around the UK?

It’s called National Server Downtime Day. At least that’s what we’ve christened it here at OCD after our most recent research showed that – on average – 7.5 hours of work each year per employee are lost to every server outage.

That’s one full day of productivity per server per annum, presumably adding up to billions of pounds in lost revenue, and that’s just the average. The figures vary widely. We drew on a range of statistics, from the UK government and industry surveys to anecdotes from new customers coming to OCD dissatisfied with the service they’d received elsewhere.

We discovered one instance where 87 hours of work a year was lost to each server. On the flip side, that dropped to just over two hours for Windows 2008 servers in a large data centre. Recent independent research by operations management firm Avocent found that a third of companies had lost mission-critical data due to unplanned downtime and 43% reported, on average, up to five unplanned downtime events each month.

OCD customers face no such frustrating and unnecessary disruptions to their time and profitability. We are very proud to say that our clients experience unplanned outages of less than three hours per year – two hours and 42 minutes to be precise. That’s a performance rate of 99.99%, a phenomenal achievement given that most of the companies don’t have an IT specialist onsite.

OCD customers know that the service we provide will ultimately save or even make them money. As one put it recently, “We might as well have given the staff an extra holiday for the time we used to lose until OCD took over our support.” That customer now gets an extra day and a half’s productivity per server per year.

So how do we do it? Put simply, by learning about how your business works, by providing a bespoke IT system to meet those requirements and by adopting a proactive approach.

Our support and maintenance schedules always include:

  • Scheduled and planned visits by our Microsoft server experts who carry out a series of checks and maintenance routines to ensure that the server is working to specified tolerances.

 

  • Constant monitoring of servers using a wide variety of tolerances and thresholds so that if one of those is breached, a loud alarm sounds in our technical offices and we react instantly to bring server performance back to normal, which in most cases can be carried out remotely.

 

  • Keeping servers updated with relevant software patches. OCD tests them beforehand to avoid risk to server performance. This is something that very few other IT support companies do and it is often untested patches and updates that play havoc with server reliability.

 

OCD has been looking after the IT systems of legal practice David Devine & Company based in Glasgow since 2007. As David points out in this newsletter’s case study: “I’m pretty cynical about the promises made by technology companies, but OCD has delivered everything the way it said it would. In three years we haven’t had any unscheduled outages: I think that says everything anyone needs to know about OCD”.

And we agree. So let’s hear it for National Server Downtime Day – one public holiday that OCD customers won’t be taking.

Until next time,

 Kevin

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It’s more than just a big hooray

March 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Some of you will notice a few things happening on our website this week as we launch some major updates to the content. In the grand scale of things, we are only a Glasgow based IT support company but we like to think of ourselves as real innovators in the way that we work and think about our customers.

We have always thought of our customers both long standing and new as the best way of describing what it is that we do and why it is so important for organisations these days. So rather than continue to have website and other marketing material that are a big hooray about us, we thought that the big hooray is actually about our customers and how their businesses benefit by working with us.

Our marketing company agree and we’ve spent the last while working up all the new content.  In essence our big story is about the lack of downtime and the total reliability of our customers’ IT systems. That’s what we do after all, we help other organisations have better and more reliable systems through our proactive IT support and IT services model.

So the big departure for us from the IT support norm is that the website is really about our customers, what we do for them and most importantly of all, how our customers in Glasgow and across the rest of Scotland feel about the IT support we provide them.

We are exceptionally proud of what we do and how much of a difference it makes to our customers businesses, so it’s really exciting from our perspective to be able to let them tell their stories about how we work with them. We hope you think so too.

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Famous at last?………..

January 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

More important than our BBC breakfast news interview, more exciting than our many requests to comment in the Scotland on Sunday and Glasgow Herald, quite frankly more important than anything that’s ever happened to us ever before…….We’ve spotted our office in the background of a Rab C Nesbitt episode! All good fun   

rabcnesbitt 300x228

Rab C Nesbitt episode showing OCD office in background

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January 2010 – Where do you go if your IT support company fails?

January 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

2008 and 2009 have been very tough years for all businesses.

Inevitably there are casualties when we go through the amount of change we have done over the last couple of years.

In the last couple of weeks two IT companies in the central belt have gone in to liquidation, Axiom Business Computers in Glasgow and RFL Group in Stirling.

Our thoughts are obviously with the staff who will be going through a very difficult time, however, our thoughts are also with the Clients of those companies who don’t know where they will get IT Support and service from.

IT is crucial to almost all businesses now and being without proper support and advice can be very dangerous.

OCD have been providing IT Support and IT Service for over 15 years, so should you need help we are here to get you through this time of transition.

We have flexible IT Support plans which are designed to suit businesses of all sizes, don’t hesitate to contact us on 0141 771 5069 or via our contact form here.

In the meantime, we hope everyone at Axiom Business Computers and RFL Group find alternative employment as soon as possible.

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CES 2010

January 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The International Consumer Electronics show (CES) is the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow. It features 2,700 exhibitors, including companies who manufacture products or provide services for the audio, digital imaging, home theater, wireless, content, gaming and IT markets.

This event is used by many manufacturers to launch new products which range from cameras and remote controls through to cars, laptops, computer systems, large screen TVs etc.

There are many glimces of what will be coming soon from an IT perspective including:

  • ioSafe disaster proof external hard drives – these things can withstand etremely high temperatures, drops from 20′ high, 5000lbs in weight on top of them, a great idea for critical backups to protect your data and more importantly your organisation!
  • A new wave of Tablet PCs (or slates) which you can write directly on to.
  • Wireless monitors and TVs, lets you display your laptop or PC screen directly on to a large screen without any connecting wires, kind of like wireless networking.
  • The latest wave of Netbook systems.

You may find there are things which would be of use in your own IT Solution, if so then contact us for more information on how best we can make them work for you.

Here are some links to take you direct to the CES and CNET websites where you can view more information on what’s going on.

http://www.cesweb.org/default.asp

http://ces.cnet.com/?tag=hdr

Happy browsing, I hope you find something of interest.

Kevin

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15 Years already!…..

December 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Time really does move fast when you’re having fun!

The last few years and in particular the last nine months, have gone past in the blink of an eye. We are still totally focused on delivering the highest quality of IT service and IT support. We have walked this path for the last 15 years and we’ll continue to walk along it for the next 15.

I mention the last nine months in particular as it’s probably seen the greatest rate, no not probably, definitely seen the greatest rate of change and advancement in OCD since I started the company in 1994.

  • We’ve implemented a new Client relationship management system that helps us communicate better with you.
  • We’ve implemented a new IT service control solution which helps to:
    • To take care of your calls better
    • Provide a facility to let you log your own calls and see outstanding calls etc.
    • Provide better reporting to you
    • Identify trends and help us manage your systems ever better
  • We’ve launched a new website which keeps you up to date on what we are doing and why.
  • We’ve launched an updated monthly newsletter to keep you in the picture with everything from handy hints through to letting you know about the big developments in IT for organisations like yours
  • We’ve created (Thanks to our many wonderful Clients) a large bank of case studies that tell the market how we work, but through your eyes.
  • We’ve worked with you to understand what kind of support you need to suit the current situation and developed our support and maintenance services to fit those needs with a variety of options
  • We’ve increased our staff in the following areas:
    • Technical
    • Administration
    • Business Development
  • We’ve created a marketing department that helps us communicate with the market more effectively, but just as importantly it helps us get a better picture of what it is that the market needs or is looking for.
  • We’ve started research on more products and services that will:
    •  Help increase your profitability
    • Make your systems even more robust
    • Protect your data
    • Provide greater peace of mind

All of this has been driven by you, our customers. All of the developments listed above are driven by our focus on you and making sure we keep up with the quantity and quality of service you need to keep your systems online, which in turn helps keep your staff productive and your business profitable.

That sounds like a lot of talk “about us”, which we generally avoid like the plague as we like our Clients to talk for us, but if you’ll forgive my brief indulgence, I hope the improvements we are making demonstrate our continued commitment to you and more importantly, you are starting to see the difference we are delivering to you.

All the best to you and yours this Christmas and New Year, may all your dreams come true….

Kevin

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Server Support | Server Monitoring

December 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

At OCD, we know how important IT is to your business but we also understand that you want to be free to concentrate on what you do, not worry about servers and systems. That’s why we offer the most advanced range of support arrangements in the market. From a basic agreement to our ever popular Virtual IT department or a bespoke combination of solutions, we address any problems quickly and effectively – often before you even know they’ve happened.

If your servers are supported by OCD we monitor them constantly:

  • Gathering critical performance information to measure it against normal operational parameters for things like CPU usage, disk space and even temperature. This ensures that if performance levels dip our systems are monitoring and tracking the situation.
  • If one or more of the thresholds are breached then our support centre is automatically alerted via our LEAP system which calls out any issues in plain English at any of the client sites OCD support.
  • This is a huge benefit over traditional methods employed by other IT companies who rely on the technician logging in remotely to check or checking email folders to see what and where something has happened.
  • Our approach allows our support team to prioritise your case and deal with it as quickly as possible.

This helps us to increase the speed at which we can fix server faults. In most cases we can rectify issues remotely with little or no interruption to your business.

To give you an indication of our performance, in the last quarter’s survey I mentioned in my last blog Microsoft rated us:

  • Over 20% higher than most other Microsoft Gold Partners in the UK for support services.
  • Over 20% higher than most other Microsoft Gold Partners in the UK for sales and business advice.

While our own figures show that we deal with over 90% of server calls four times faster than our Service Level Agreement allows for.

The figures speak for themselves. And so do our customers. Take the insurance broker Business Insurance Bureau which suffered sever meltdown recently. Its principal Bob Hannah says: “OCD had advised us to replace our server, we knew that an upgrade was over due, but we were committed to other projects and had to make a judgement call. We chose to believe the server would last another few months,” he says.

It didn’t. But when the server did crash, OCD stepped in to get business up and running again within hours. “When I knew the server had failed I didn’t worry about it or loose any sleep – I knew OCD would take care of us,” says Bob.

Bridgewater Housing Association benefits from OCD’s Virtual IT Department (see this month’s case study). “IT is not our business, but it is critical to our business, enabling us to keep tabs on and control over a lot of complex and challenging issues,” comments finance manager Pamela Milne.

“Since OCD has been running its Virtual IT Department for us, we’ve noticed that we don’t have big problems anymore. And, if we do need to call them out, OCD usually beat their own service levels – this is the kind of service we expect now.”

Until next time,

Kevin

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OCD Survey Results – Compiled by Microsoft

November 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Every quarter Microsoft ask Gold Partners (the highest partner accreditation you can get with Microsoft) like OCD  to take part in the Microsoft CSAT survey.

The survey is compiled by a completely independent organisation and its purpose is to measure many things including:

  • Quality of Support
  • Quality of Sales advice
  • What Clients want that we don’t offer at present?

We are very proud to report the results placed us at 20% above other gold partners for our quality of support and for our sales and business advice.  We are very proud of this and it continues the trend from previous surveys.  

We state that we are Obsessed with service and we are because it’s the one thing that organisations want from their IT support provider, prompt, reliable, effective service and our whole business is built on offering the best there is, so it’s nice when the team are acknowledged and recognised for delivering what we promise.

Rest assured, we will continue to work hard on delivering higher and more effective levels of service to ensure that we continue to deliver what our customers want and to remain demonstrably at least 20 percent better than our competitors

You also asked that we provide the following services:

  • Out of hours support (Support before 9am and after 5pm)
  • The ability to log, examine and close calls via your own Client access area on the web
  • We are happy to announce that both of these services will go live at the end of January 2010.

It’s fantastic to see such positive feedback from you and it’s great to introduce services that add real value to your organisation. The team work very hard not just on their technical ability to deliver the best solutions, but their interpersonal skills so we communicate with you effectively and have conversations in English rather that technical jargon.  We’re not in the business of trying to impress Clients with the number of acronyms we can use, we prefer to keep the conversations simple, to the point and leave you safe in the knowledge that we are taking care of your IT which lets you concentrate on running your business.

A big thank you to everyone who took part in the survey, we had a response rate of well over 50%.  It shows how much ‘buy in’ there is to our relationship with you as the average response rate achieved by other gold partners is in the region of 10%. 

Speak soon,

Kevin

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