Well done to our infrastructure partners Zen and Qnap

October 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We partner with a select set of IT infrastructure partners which helps us deliver the best possible service to our Clients.

It’s good to give credit where credit is due and to that end we’d like to congratulate QNAP and Zen for winning the top awards in their categories from PC Pro magazine this month.

It’s important for OCD to partner with the best companies as this helps us deliver the best products and solutions for you.

It’s also important for you to know that we select the best to partner with in a very crowded marketplace.

Many of our competitors simply select the cheapest, the latest fad or the best deal for them. Rest assured, at OCD we only look to partner with the companies which will be the best for you.

Well done Zen and QNAP, keep up the good work.

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Case Study – The Tullochan Trust – IT Support and service Dumbarton

October 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Every week or two we’ll post a blog with one of our case studies to give you a feel for why our Clients partner with us and the value they get from our relationship.

Reactive support doesn’t work

The Tullochan Trust is the largest youth charity working in West Dunbartonshire providing inspiration and opportunities for over 400 children and young people aged 9 – 17 annually.

Tullochan provide a secure feature in young people’s lives, giving them the skills and experience to build confidence, self-belief and respect.

Tullochan’s previous IT provider was very reactive, response was slow and it was beginning to affect the morale of staff working on their day to day jobs.

Finding the right IT partner is crucial

True value needs to be measured not simply on the obvious investment of the support package, it needs to be measured on the real return on investment and the difference it can actually make to the effectiveness of a team and the morale in an organisation, our Clients experiences is cheapest is rarely best!

“Our previous IT company was essentially a very small operation, usually just 1 or 2 staff, and therefore was very reactive to issues and could take a few days to deal with the problem.” comments David Craig, Head of Fundraising for The Tullochan Trust.

The team at Tullochan found using the IT to be demotivating and demoralising until OCD stepped in and organised the IT as it should be, fixed outstanding issues and provided the promised level of support, David Craig comments, “OCD bring a tremendous amount of IT experience backed with sound and very knowledgeable staff. They very quickly audited our infrastructure and presented some cost effective solutions which would improve our systems. We have quarterly meetings with them to review things and discuss and plan the months ahead.”

The OCD experience
“OCD are different breed to other organisations we’ve worked with in the past. They really do care and will ensure that the guidance and advice is relevant to your needs whilst trying to identify cost effective solutions” states David Craig.

If asked to describe OCD in a few words, I’d say – Professional, experienced, caring and good value”

If you need your IT taken care of properly then get in touch and find out why organisations like The Tullochan Trust choose to work with us.

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The value of a great team

July 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Very often time passes us by so quickly that it’s easy to forget the quality of and the effort put in by the team around you.

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

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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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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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