Pitcher Partners in Newcastle/Hunter has engaged us for all their managed services solutions and IT networking for 15 years. Find out why.
PITCHER PARTNERS
Many assumptions can be made when two established businesses merge; one being that disruptions are par for the course. However, with saberVox’ management of the IT systems merger for Newcastle based accounting firms, Pitcher Partners and DFK Crosbie, our deliverable focus was of one principle – a union that was both seamless and cohesive.
Pitcher Partners is a nationwide Association of independent firms across Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, and Sydney; growing since 1991 to become Australia’s eighth largest accounting and business advisory firm.
For more than 15 years saberVox has proudly managed the Newcastle/Hunter arm of Pitcher Partners for all their managed services solutions and IT networking.
CLIENT’S CHALLENGES:
In October of 2021, it was announced that the accounting and advisory firm, DFK Crosbie, would be merging with Pitcher Partners Newcastle to solidify the firm as the premier Newcastle business and advisory firm.
With a now combined 130 staff, including 17 partners, the challenge to both Pitcher Partners’ offices was ensuring a smooth transition for their staff.
The challenge to saberVox was not only the taking over from DFK Crosbie’s IT team, but the two-week turnaround to plan and deliver upon this major migration seamlessly.
OUR STRATEGY:
The most pressing IT requirements from Pitcher Partners were extensive, with multiple touchpoints.
For saberVox, our first task was to migrate all staff members to the enduring Pitcher Partners Microsoft 365 tenant.
Following this, email and one drive data had to be migrated over from DFK Crosbie to the enduring Pitcher tenant.
Subsequently, a new email system (and naturally new distribution groups and shared mailboxes) required universal updates to email signatures, adhering to the new branding guidelines.
With a merger also comes combining online real estate, with saberVox working closely with Pitcher Partners’ website provider to ensure DNS points to the new website on the go-live date.
OUR SOLUTION:
Within this two-week deadline, saberVox had pre-staged the business-as-usual requirements to ensure the essential smooth crossover for Pitcher Partner staff.
To mitigate any business-hours issues, saberVox staff were deployed to work after-hours on the weekend before go-live.
Five of our engineers were on-site over this weekend to reconfigure all devices, with two engineers on-site on go-live Monday to help allay any fears over IT updates.
Minimal issues were reported, with the seamless change-over that was required by Pitcher Partners achieved.
Concurrently to this business-facing work, saberVox was now also tasked with becoming the IT support for the DFK Crosbie origin team.
With only 4-weeks’ notice, saberVox now managed all help-desk ticketing, license conversion and deploying our remote management software to all their servers and workstations.
Simultaneously, we began seeking solutions to the former IT companies’ Wi-Fi offering that was deemed sub-par by the former DFK Crosbie staff.
The existing internet connectivity was costly and slow; our solution which overhauled their internet and maintained a better alignment to their Maitland site was implemented without fault, with speeds x 5 faster, and is now saving the client thousands in ongoing costs.
THE RESULTS:
“The team at saberVox appeared to make light work of a complex merger, with little impact to our team. The planning for this happened as we all came out of Covid-lockdowns, which was handled exceptionally well by the team.”
- Cost saving – pricing reduced by $20K per month moving from Azure to our private cloud network
- Seamless – IT merger was a smooth transition with little to no down-time
- Merged staff reporting a far superior user experience under our tenure
