the set-up
Acent builds, designs, operates and maintains "mission critical" facilities for their clients. "Mission Critical" means if these facilities, such as a computer data center, go down then their customer's business comes to a screeching halt.
Presently, Ascent manages over 2 million square feet of these kinds of facilities for clients throughout North America.
the problem
Growing pains. Four internal IT staffers ran ragged trying to manage an organization of aging PCs. To make matters worse, and self-perpetuating, a lack of clear IT policies and control opened the door to more chaos as employees would install their own software and utilities which inevitably would cause more system crashes.
Meanwhile, Ascent's phone system was completely maxed out leaving six of their newest employees phoneless and their already overstretched IT department faced with investing in a new system rather than additional staffing help.
Finally, if Ascent maintains "mission critical" facilities for their clients, then their own "Op-Center" which monitors those facilities should be considered "SUPER CRITICAL."
To continue giving their customers the excellent service Ascent is renowned for - they were pouring huge sums of money into their own strained and loosely managed IT infrastructure.
Something had to break... Management was faced with either the monumental investment of a whole new PC-based infrastructure and phone system, or calling Avatara.
Bet you can guess which choice they made...
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problem solved
Since moving to thin-clients, Ascent now only needs one head of IT in-house. Thanks to the stability of their Avatara virtual environment, that IT Manager can spend the bulk of their time focusing on customers rather than addressing in-house problems.
Since their Avatara system is "everywhere imaginable", Ascent is now easily able to set up remote command centers at customer sites. These remote stations function as if they were right in the Ascent headquarters building in St. Louis.
Oh yes... and everyone has a phone now.
the bottom line
Ascent is saving over $25,000 per month* on their IT.
*This is not counting the savings of no more capital hardware purchases, property tax, insurance and electricity savings!
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