Richard Place Dobson’s journey to cloud with Extech Cloud

Professional services firm Richard Place Dobson on the benefits of hosted IT infrastructure as provided by Extech Cloud.

Before Extech Cloud started working with Richard Place Dobson (RPD) in October 2019, the firm was at a point where it needed to upgrade its servers and infrastructure and was looking to mitigate hardware replacement costs.

With almost 50 staff members across the Crawley and East Grinstead offices, the firm was also facing significant IT licensing costs and wanted to change. Extech Cloud had the perfect solution.

Karen Corduff, director at the firm, says: “We approached Extech Cloud to provide us with a modernised, more efficient IT system. Extech Cloud has designed a hosted desktop solution that works with all the range of software that we use and is a lot faster and easier to use than our old system.

“Throughout the project, the people we have worked with have managed to complete a very complicated build, during a very stressful time (lockdown and working remotely presented its own challenges) and at all times communicated with a lot of people with little understanding of IT, in a way that we understood. In undertaking this project, I anticipated a lot more problems but any that arose were dealt with by Extech Cloud,” she adds.

When RPD first approached Extech Cloud, its IT system was fragmented and, with slow VPN performance, it was providing an increasingly frustrating experience for staff. The firm needed a new strategic IT plan and there were several key issues looming:

• It was on countdown to Windows 7 end-of-life on January 14, 2020
• The database software was end-of-life and RPD was facing huge upgrade bills
• RPD also couldn’t update some of the software without significant cost.

RPD was looking at tens of thousands of pounds on licensing costs alone, so it decided to break the cycle. Extech Cloud audited the whole IT infrastructure and all assets, then spent six months modernising everything, including all user PCs and laptops.