Not because they are necessarily better than you, it’s because everyone is saying the same thing, they are the best, they go the extra mile, they have the best team, they, they, they, they…….

This has been the case for a while, however, it’s become very apparent through 2009 – 2010 as people desperately increase their marketing via mailshots, cold calls, email blasts etc.

Seeing this, we made a decision that we needed to work a different way, we needed to promote ourselves differently.

The OCD way is to stop talking about ourselves, how wonderful we are, how experienced we are, how we go the extra mile, how we invest in training and so on.

Instead we now let the most important people, our Clients, do the talking for us, we operate on the concept of proof.

Our Clients have taken time out of their busy schedules to tell you why they value us, why they partner with us, why they are extremely comfortable recommending us and so on.

We’ve taken it a stage further than most others who dabble with a few case studies or quotes, we have created a complete booklet of case studies which we can send to you, or you can download from our case studies section on the website.

The point of working this way is to differentiate OCD in the IT Service and IT Support marketplace by giving you a high comfort factor in selecting us to partner with.

The feedback prospects and Clients give us is that this approach is incredibly valuable and lets them see we don’t take them for granted and don’t shove generic sales spiel down their neck.

If you’d like to talk further please don’t hesitate to contact us, we’d be delighted to hear from you and provide a tour of our facilities.

We can’t use the prevalent ADSL or cable technology as our distance from the telephone exchange is at the outer limit which means our speed isn’t that great and in addition, the upload speed of an ADSL connection is pretty poor.

The result of this means we have to look at a technology called leased lines.

This isn’t something new, it’s been around for a while.  It’s a very good connection to the internet, it downloads and uploads information at the same speed and unlike ADSL and Cable and it can be scaled up to very high speeds.  The downside? It’s very expensive.

Now, ballpark figures for a 10mb leased line for us are around £11,000 per year for a three year contract (depending on where you are and the type of building you’re in etc. the costs vary).

We may need to increase the speed of this as the service takes off and demand increases, so we could move to a 20mb/30mb or 40mb connection.

Once we get to the 40mb speeds the costs increase to circa £17,000.

Anyway, as we continue to expand the business, we are reaching the point where the office we purchased three years ago is getting tight and we need to increase the space we have.

The connection for OCD between the new service and the office space we require is this -> as Internet providers release new technology called FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet) they can provide speeds of 40mb download and 10mb upload for circa £720 per annum.

Only certain exchanges are enabled for this technology with more coming on through this year and in to the future.

All of a sudden we have an interesting business decision to make which is this.

Do we stay where we are and look to buy more space in an office near us, pay for the leased line at £x, or do we look to move to an office near one of the enabled exchanges which would give us our connection for £720 per annum (saving between £10,000 to £17,000) and use the extra we would have spent on the leased line for more office space?

I find it interesting that the need for speed on internet connections can have an impact (potentially) on where you would locate your organisation.  It’s not something I had thought about in any great until now.  However, given how reliant we are on email and Internet use and because many now and in the future will use more Internet based services, it’s certainly something to think about when you chose to open a new office or relocate an existing one.

Feel free to contact us to have a conversation about this or anything else you feel we could help with, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

OCD are an IT company based in Glasgow who provide IT Consultancy, IT Projects and IT Support services to businesses and charities throughout Scotland and  the North of England.

At OCD we are very fortunate to have had such a team for a considerable time now.

In my experience it takes very little time to thank the people around you for the effort they put in, many times this being over and above the call of duty.

It’s great to be involved in such a customer focussed IT company where the team genuinely care about the results and service they provide to our Clients.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at OCD for their commitment, care, hard work, expertise and effort in providing the best possible IT support and IT services to our Clients.

You are a great bunch of people to work alongside and you are a credit to yourselves and the company.

Thank you.

Kevin

I vividly remember when I first got involved in IT support and IT solutions some 23 years ago that we stored 160k on an 8″ floppy (not that floppy) disk.

Most readers may not even remember floppy disks, it was how we stored information before hard drives were commonly used.

Seagate have now launched a 3 terabyte hard drive which is an absolutely huge amount of storage capacity.

To give some perspective, the animated movie Monsters vs Aliens required around 100 terabytes of storage whilst in production.

Whilst this sounds great, there are other things you need to think of before utilising this much storage like:

• How to archive it
• How to access it
• How to protect it and
• How to effectively use it.

OCD are experts in providing this type of advice, so feel free to contact us for advice if you need to, we’re here to help.

Inc.com talk about it a little more here.

Many people hear the term and sometimes the hyperbole which can surround it at times and find themselves unsure and confused as to what they should do and what it means for their business.  It has featured frequently on the news, in seminars / webinars and newspaper articles for a while now with many vendors pushing their cloud offerings hard.

 The simple fact is like anything in life, Cloud computing is the answer and a great solution for some companies and it’s not for others.

 First of all you need to have a clear understanding of what it is that you are trying to achieve and whether cloud computing will help you achieve that. There are some things to think about here that are absolutely vital;

1. Do you have or can you get a connection to the Internet that will support the application and the number of users who will need to access it concurrently? If you don’t, it just won’t work properly.
2. Does using a cloud application deliver any real benefit to you – does it save money, does it deliver more up to date software, or is just a different way of doing what you already do anyway, in which case what is the benefit of change?
3. Is it secure? The majority of work done internally in companies is confidential to one degree or another, does the cloud solution you are thinking of deliver the kind of security you want.
4. Where does the data get stored? If you have confidential data when you save it or use it on a cloud application, where is it stored when you are not using it and can you be sure it is secure?

These are just four simple questions, but they are ones you need to ask and get answers to. We ask the same questions when we are working for a customer on the idea of cloud computing as a solution. In our design work on our own first cloud application -  offsite backup – we went through a rigorous process of researching, questioning and testing before we were absolutely happy that the solution we offer answers the four questions above adequately.

To be sure, there are some great solutions which are Cloud based, CRM systems, email systems, accounts systems to name a few.  Some of these are a perfect fit for some companies, however, the best thing you can do is to get the correct unbiased advice up-front from people you can trust and who have the experience and knowledge to steer you in the right direction.

Like most people in IT, we are excited about the potential for cloud based applications, however we also recognise that the software providers can also be a little bit too enthusiastic and take things to market without fully thinking through the implications. To ensure that you do get value and make the right choice for your business, we will always lay out the whole picture so you make your decision based on the full set of facts.

The two following quotes from David Hewitt, the IT Manager from Kilgraston School for Girls says it all I believe:

“OCD were the stand out supplier, the company’s focus on understanding our need and proposing a solution that fitted made them the obvious choice.”

“From the start it was clear that OCD were going to deliver not just a better technical solution, but a higher and more focused level of service. We would confidently recommend OCD”

Our business model is based on the concept of proof.  We let our Clients do the talking for us as opposed to the everyday method others use, which is to tell you how wonderful they are in their eyes.

Definitions:

*Cloud – Sometimes referred to as software as a service, software + Service, Internet computing and so on.  In simple basic terms it’s where your servers and applications i.e. email are located in a datacentre which you access via the Internet.

 *On premise – Where you have servers and applications running locally, i.e. on your business premises.

When we are tasked by a customer to specify and install an IT system for their business, the first place we start is with the business itself.

There is such a huge variety of equipment and software out there that it can be really difficult for the non expert to specify the right IT solution and all too easy for the poorly qualified or unscrupulous IT vendor to specify something that suits their needs without suiting yours.

Our approach is to find out about you and your business to define what kind of systems, software and implementation services are needed to deliver an effective, long lasting IT solution that really fits your business needs now and for the useful life of the solution (3 to 5 years normally).

This does not always make us the cheapest up front, but what our customers do find is that over the life of the solution, OCD offer a far better ROI as the real cost of owning an OCD IT solution is lower.

So if you need an effective, business focused IT solution in Glasgow, Scotland or further afield, you know where we are and how we work.

But that isn’t really the point of this article. We also found that one of our competitors was spending quite a lot of time on our site. I won’t name them because they would probably be really embarrassed, but in many ways it is very flattering that a close competitor is looking at as in such microscopic detail.

IT support in Glasgow is a very defined market and there are quite a lot of companies offering support of all kinds, but we are really the only one that has really defined and stuck to an entirely proactive support model because it is the one that our customers and our target market need and demand. This does not mean we fit everyone’s need.

The other Glasgow IT Support company I mentioned, well they do traditional IT support and only respond when something is broken, rather than doing what we do, which is make sure it doesn’t break in the first place. So we have been left with a dilemma. Has this competitor realised that more and more organisations in Glasgow now want proactive IT support, as opposed to the reactive old style maintenance that most Glasgow IT Support companies provide? Or are they just fishing around to see what their competitors are doing.

As always we wish them well, but really hope they are just fishing around.

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.

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

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