“Before the IT team we were pretty manual. We’re now quite integrated and the whole company is on the same server base and we’re all linked so it’s sort of like a live system for us. We were a million miles away from that before the IT team.”
“We had no internal IT resource and we are not particularly IT savvy, so it was great to work with a locally based business who spoke to us in plain English.”
Kyle Skene
General Manager
The Business
Winemakers and exporters Giesen Wines was founded by brothers Theo, Alex and Marcel Giesen, who migrated from Germany to New Zealand in 1981 to make world class wines in the Southern Hemisphere.
Some 30 years later, the business has grown into an impressive enterprise, with vineyards throughout Marlborough and a sales team spread across Canterbury, Marlborough and Australia.
Details
Location: Nationwide
Sector: Manufacturing/Export/Food and Beverage
Users/Seats: 50-100
Services provided: Managed Services, Office 365, Datacentre Services, Internet and VOIP (telephony)
The Challenges
One of the primary challenges the business faced was the need to bring their staff “closer together” in the words of general manager Kyle Skene. “We had no internal IT resource and we are not particularly IT savvy, so it was great to work with a locally based business who spoke to us in plain English.”
The company was also growing rapidly and needed to put in place an IT infrastructure that was scalable and could meet the needs of their mobile sales team in particular.
The Solution:
Transition to the Cloud
The I.T. team have taken Giesen from a “pretty manual” process, to being well integrated in terms of their IT systems and communications, and fully supporting a mobile workforce.
In 2011 the I.T. team installed a new server for Giesen along with managed services to support their network and provide upgrades.
In 2013 the I.T. Team migrated the company from an on-premises server to a data centre server, and put the staff onto cloud hosted Office 365.
Support is now provided for 50 users as the company continues to grow.
Supporting a Mobile Workforce
Meeting the needs of a mobile sales team operating around New Zealand, Australia and the United States include providing access to mail online, remote server access, remote support and provision of suitable mobile hardware so business can be easily conducted while staff are on the road.
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