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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An example of how technology can impact business decisions.

July 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We will be launching a new service soon which requires a high speed internet connection.

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.

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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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