Ian Williams is a large UK-based facilities management organisation with over 1,000 staff. After difficulties with their previous IT supplier, we have helped them to adopt Office 365, move to the cloud and provide all-inclusive IT Managed Services.

  • Ian Williams
Looking up at buildings

“Chorus has an excellent service ethic. All I have to do is call the helpdesk and any issue is logged and dealt with. We have… an easy openness with the team, which is healthy and refreshing and means we work very well together.”

IT Manager, Ian Williams

The challenges

  • Needed a new IT Managed Services provider with better account management
  • Better cash flow management
  • Required modernisation of the whole IT infrastructure

The solutions

  • Hybrid solution of cloud-based and on-premise virtual structure
  • Server migration
  • Office 365

The benefits

  • Lower costs and reduction of physical space and power usage
  • Efficient day-to-day account management
  • A modern IT infrastructure
  • Hardware & software management
  • Rapid solution delivery
Buildings in the sky

Background

Ian Williams is one of the UK's largest property services companies, working in over 400,000 homes each year. It employs around 1,000 staff across 14 national sites and over 350 of these staff rely on IT for their day-to-day responsibilities.

After issues with the previous supplier, IT Manager, Steve Harvey invited three companies to tender, including Chorus. “I had previous encounters with Chorus’s founder, Mark Taylor and I knew him to be very competent, both technically and in managing his company. By this time they’d grown to a size appropriate to managing IT for a company of our size. They proved to be competitive, knowledgeable and willing to include ‘spike’ input in a fixed quarterly charge, which is key for managing cash flow. For example, setting up laptops and PCs is all inclusive rather than being charged separately.”

Builders on construciton site

The plan

The company had some servers at a datacentre and some at HQ. One of the first tasks was to migrate from 12 large physical servers to a modern Hyper-V 2012 R2 virtual cluster consisting of 2 nodes. The virtual structure works well for Ian Williams: costs are lower and it reduces the space and power required. Some staff are field-based (and benefit from ‘cloud-based’ access) while others are in head office and for them it makes sense to use on-premise servers for speed and resilience.

“It’s the best use of the cloud for data placement,” explains Chorus director, Anthony Sherry. “Also, like many companies, Ian Williams has various pieces of bespoke software – line-of-business applications which it makes sense to keep on-premise.”

Modern building

Better hardware management

Chorus also manages Ian Williams’s hardware and software requirements across its 14 offices, setting up users, fixing problems and working proactively to ensure the company’s efficiency and resilience are maximised and uncompromised.

“We’re now working towards further virtualisation, using Microsoft Office 365,” Steve continues. “We were using a document management system which we wrote in-house but now we’re moving this to SharePoint as we all agree it makes perfect sense to maximise our investment in 365. Chorus has excellent skill sets in this area, too, along with web development and design services, all of which are important to us.”

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