Future Asset Management had experienced two consecutive months of intermittent emails. Although the system appeared to be working, emails were not coming through. Future’s IT provider could not resolve the issue and subsequently proposed to replace the server at a total project cost of £16,000.

Graham Wingar, Financial Planning Partner at Future Asset Management, felt this cost was disproportionately high. Having already worked with Orbits on smaller projects, he turned to Orbits for second opinion.

True to Graham’s suspicions, the proposed server was massively over specified for an organisation of Future’s size. Following a review of Future’s needs, Orbits suggested a smaller server combined with Microsoft’s hosted Exchange email system.

Significantly, with a total project cost of £3,562 plus a monthly charge of £40 for the hosted Exchange subscription, the solution from Orbits was 78% cheaper.

“Aside from saving Future Asset Management £12,500, the hosted Exchange email which we provided as part of the solution provides many benefits and features,” explains Jim Lewington, Orbits IT Technical Director. “These include ample storage for emails, shared calendars, contacts, tasks and mailboxes, as well as remote web access for emails and syncing across mobile devices.

“With Microsoft’s hosted Exchange email system, all emails are stored remotely in a cloud-based platform. This frees Future’s server from storing emails and allows its performance to be put entirely into file and print sharing, user account controls and network configuration.”

The charity therefore sought an affordable fixed price IT support and maintenance contract backed with a Service Level Agreement including proactive IT monitoring and guaranteed response times.

“Following two months of email issues which our previous IT provider was unable to resolve without a hefty £16,000 price tag, I decided to ask Orbits if they were able to find a more appropriate and affordable solution.

“I had never heard of Microsoft’s hosted Exchange email system but once Jim explained it to me, it made perfect sense for what we needed. By moving our emails to remote cloud storage, rather than buying a new and very expensive server to store our emails, we gained the reliability and functionality we needed without incurring a substantial cost.

“We are very pleased with the performance of our email system and server. Everything works as it should and we are not wasting time trying to resolve technical issues. If I didn’t know our emails are now stored remotely in the cloud instead of on a server, I certainly wouldn’t be able to tell.

“Orbits is a genuinely nice company to deal with. They provide a personal, fair and very responsive service. Following their highly satisfactory performance on this project we are switching to Orbits for all our IT support. Following a very successful trial, we are also switching to Orbits’ VoIP phone system, which will provide us with better value for money and flexibility for remote working.”