Virtualised Infrastructure Utilising Terminal Services.

Zed One Consolidate And Virtualise 4Children’s IT Infrastructure Reducing IT Support Costs.

4Children is the national charity focused on children and families. They develop, influence and shape national policy on all aspects of children, young people and families lives and work with a wide range of partners to deliver real support for children and families in their community.

High Level Of Service And Inherent Flexibility.

Unhappy and dissatisfied with the level and quality of support from their current IT supplier and realising that they needed to look at alternative solutions, 4Children spoke to a number of organisations before choosing and engaging Zed One in early 2010. “We were impressed with their technical knowledge, expertise and the way they got their message across,” said Chris. “Their Zed Blocks support was also a key factor in that it gave us a high level of service with inherent flexibility, enabling us to prioritise our needs and help us to manage our costs,”

Zed One’s consultants carried out thorough system tests and a produced a comprehensive and detailed audit of 4Children’s IT infrastructure identifying precisely where the problems lay. They clearly identified the route causes and from this proposed a cost effective IT solution to deliver an efficient and secure IT system with minimal disruption, greatly enhanced user experience and excellent productivity improvements.

Virtualised Infrastructure Utilising Terminal Services.

This involved the upgrade of their IT infrastructure through consolidation, virtualisation and the implementation of Microsoft Terminal Services. “The project rollout took nine months from start to finish,” said Chris. “Zed One were brilliant throughout. Their structured approach, professionalism and friendliness of the staff ensured that the whole thing went extremely smoothly.”

Prior to the installation of the new infrastructure 4Children had been spending around £40,000 annually on reactive IT support. With the new solution in place this has been reduced by more than a third, providing us with a significant return on our investment.

Coping with increasing staff numbers.
Since implementation the number of users of the system has doubled to almost 300, of which around 200 are remotely based. “There is no way our old systems would have coped with this growth,” concluded Chris. “Without the changes the Support issues and support costs would have doubled and staff productivity would have been seriously effected”. Now, the savings we are making are allowing us to keep ahead of the game by investing these back into our core IT systems. The flexibility of Zed Blocks allows us to prioritise our IT cases, so that the most urgent are responded to within 15 minutes, while non-urgent minor issues are resolved the next day.

“Zed One are the ideal IT partner for 4Children. Their product knowledge and importantly how to apply this to our benefit have been imperative for us over the last year. As a charity we have to make sure we get real value for money on our IT spend and I know that working with Zed One we will always get that.”