“It was a critical situation,” remembered John Nicklin, Sales Director with SORCE, specialists in rapid deployment intranet and extranet portals. “With Exchange down, we had no email service whatsoever. And of course, as always seems to be the way with such crises, it happened at the worst possible time: 48 hours before Martin Miles, our Technical Director, was due to fly off for his holidays.”
John and his colleagues had known for some time that they needed to replace their existing in-house Exchange server, and they had been seriously considering moving to a hosted service.
“For smaller businesses the hosted model makes really good sense,” he explained. “You don’t want your staff tied up with internal IT support and maintenance issues – you want everyone contributing to your service and getting the business in. And you don’t want thousands of pounds of capital buried in server hardware and licenses,” he added. “The hosted model releases you from all of these burdens, and gives you vastly improved flexibility.”
John already knew some of the Perceptive Online team and, impressed with their willingness to ‘go the extra mile’, set them a challenge: “Get us up and running with Hosted Exchange before Martin goes on holiday.”
“And they did!” he said. “Almost literally overnight, we had a fully functioning Hosted Exchange service.”
Three years on, John remains impressed. “With Hosted Exchange our admin burden is zero. Perceptive set up new user accounts, carry our regular backups, install software upgrades and provide a great spam control service,” he noted.
There are clear financial benefits as well: SORCE pay for Perceptive’s Hosted Exchange service on a monthly basis and can set those payments off against profits for corporation tax purposes. “That’s much better than ploughing thousands into server hardware and licenses,” commented John.
As far as Perceptive themselves are concerned, John has nothing but praise. “They’re accessible, responsive and very willing to go the extra mile – they’re good guys, and I can wholeheartedly recommend them,” he said.