Client: Connor Warin
Industry: Chartered Accountants
Employees: 10
Established: 1991
Clients: 200 SMEs, 400 individuals
Challenge:
Benefits:
Connor Warin’s small business and sole trader clients use over a dozen different accounting packages between them. Not only does the Essex-based firm of Chartered Accountants need to accommodate Sage, Iris and QuickBooks, they have to have multiple, old versions of many of them.
“Most of our clients never upgrade their accounts software,” says founding partner Grahame Connor. “They just continue to use whatever version they’ve had for years. Upgrades in this field are expensive, so you can’t blame them, but it has a big impact on our IT. We need to have access to a lot of different versions of a lot of different packages in order to service our clients.”
Reliable and fast
Connor Warin has been a using Cloud-enabled IT service from ThinHost® for the past four years; ThinHost® stores all the firm’s data and applications remotely and end-users simply log on using their laptops or desk-based PCs for fast and reliable access to whichever software package and accounts file they need. “It requires a fair amount of space to store all that specialist software and our old in-house server was forever keeling over. Once we migrated all our software out to ThinHost®, there were never any serious outages and we’ve never had to call in their 99.9% up-time guarantee.“
Fully managed fully supported IT
Like many small businesses, Connor Warin lays no claim to specialist IT expertise. Because ThinHost® is a ‘virtual hosted desktop service’ you don’t manage – or even own – an IT system. You’re essentially subscribing to a fully managed, fully supported, fully secure IT service, all you really have to think about is your PCs, laptops or however you want to access the Internet. ThinHost®‘s subscription service includes full technical support via a UK-based telephone and online helpdesk. “Our desktops look and feel just like the normal Windows desktop” says Grahame Connor. “We didn’t need to train staff when we migrated over and we still have all the familiar Microsoft Office software as well as all our accounting packages. We’ve used the ThinHost® helpdesk a few times over the years and they’ve been consistently good.”
Punch above your weight
ThinHost® MD, Ricky Reemer says “Most boutique accountancy firms simply can’t afford to ‘DIY’ the enterprise-grade security and robustness that come with ThinHost® as standard”. ThinHost® automatically replicates all data to standby equipment in a backup data centre, providing a complete disaster recovery solution for all customers. “Security is business-critical for us” agrees Grahame Connor. “The consequences of a server failure and data loss would be dire. We don’t have to worry about reliability any more.” ThinHost® also has built-in anti-virus safeguards and anti-spam software.
Scaleable
The other partner in Connor Warin left the business in 2011 and one of their two branches had to close down. The fact that the ThinHost® service is fully scaleable meant one less headache for Grahame Connor during the downsizing phase. “Our user requirement went down quickly and we had to restructure our subscription with ThinHost®. It was easy to do and we’re very happy with their level of responsiveness. From time to time we also need to increase our storage space allocation and they seem to accommodate that very smoothly and quickly.”
Predictable
ThinHost®’s monthly fees are based on the number of end-users and a couple of other simple factors so subscribers can easily see what they are paying for. “Predictable and transparent billing is most welcome,” says Grahame Connor. “We run monthly reports and we can always see what we’re spending with ThinHost®. Even when we increase our users or memory requirements from month to month there never seems to be a hugely steep increase.”
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |