Stagestruck

Stagestruck chose ramsac to replace their entire server infrastructure, migrate the organisation to Office 365 and provide a complete IT management solution for IT management and support.

Who are Stagestruck?

Whether you’re launching a car, holding an AGM or want to help people experience your brand, Stagestruck can help. Based in Hertfordshire and London, they have been creating and delivering World-class events, experiences and communications since 1984. Today, there are over 70 people working there, helping blue-chip clients in a variety of ways: from strategy development to creative concepts; from production management to creating physical environments, films and technology. Stagestruck deliver, from start to finish.

What prompted the move to ramsac?

Stagestruck is a rapidly growing company, which meant their demands on IT were changing at quite a rate. Stagestruck’s server infrastructure was rapidly needing updating; it was coming to the end of its life-cycle and there was a desire to take advantage of new services available, and to get some strategic advice to design and implement a system to match the current and future demands on the business.

Why ramsac?

ramsac have spent over 26 years providing managed IT and telecoms solutions, with 24/7 remote support and an impartial, strategically-led approach to a wide variety of organisations. Ben Waller, Operations Director from Stagestruck, explains why they chose to work with ramsac; “We chose ramsac as I liked the well-developed structure that was offered. To have a dedicated technical relationship manager that looks after us as a business and provide high level advice is really useful, also having a dedicated engineer to implement solutions and then to have the levels of remote support offered was very attractive to us.”

Managing and supporting IT

Stagestruck have subscribed to ramsac’s managed IT service, ‘totalIT’ which provides a fully managed, monitored and supported IT service. ramsac take care of everything from supporting end users with any IT questions, to round the clock system monitoring to proactively spot potential nasties and fix them before they become issues. ramsac allocates regular remote IT admin time to keep on top of patching, updates, back up management, security management, user account admin and all the things that are important, but so often forgotten in an SME environment. ramsac also provides regular onsite time with a dedicated IT manager and strategic input from one of our IT relationship managers. All of this combines to provide Stagestruck with all the skills levels of a full IT department, for a fixed monthly cost.

An upgraded IT network

Having undertaken a detailed IT health check, ramsac have worked with Stagestruck to replace server infrastructure. One key goal was to improve Stagestruck’s disaster recovery systems, with an aim of reducing the time it would take to recover key services in the event of an entire site loss or server failure. With a rural location and a heavy reliance on very large graphic and video files, it was agreed to maintain many server roles as physical ‘on premise’ servers, but ramsac also helped migrate many services to the cloud, including the migration of emails to Office365.

Discussing the implementation and move to ramsac, Ben Waller commented “Implementation was very good. I expected there to be more issues with the transfer across suppliers but ramsac certainly took the lead in managing the crossover. I felt like ramsac took ownership very quickly and I was comfortable that they were taking a stepped approach. They were very diplomatic and professional throughout this process which for me was very assuring.”

The benefits

Moving to ramsac and total IT has allowed Stagestruck more flexibility and given them a reduction of risk. Ben Waller commented “Since moving to ramsac we benefit from the much wider knowledge base which is now available to us, increased support, strategic development, reduction of risk and some new friends! We would certainly recommend ramsac to other organisations.”

“Stagestruck is a fairly informal environment, where our work pressures are due to the incredibly tight deadlines. This impacts the way our IT support needs to be managed. When we have a deadline for a show, everything has to be ready for that moment, there is no going back. Our ramsac consultant got this straight away, he understood our needs and worked with us accordingly. He knows when to be cautious about making changes and which changes can just happen; he has a very good thought process with regards to problem solving; he is always on time, smart, polite. I have a strong working relationship with him and am always happy to see him. Simply put, he inspires confidence and I trust him.”

Ben Waller, Operations Director from Stagestruck