Apis Consulting Group – IT Outsourcing Case Study

Apis Consulting Group is a professional services provider specialising in management and implementation, procurement, learning and development, risk management and more. The organisation is based in Canberra and Brisbane, and has experienced significant growth in the last year.

Situation
When Apis approached RDA Group in December 2006, their IT was loosely managed internally. The 40 strong staff habitually contacted a colleague with any IT related problem – everything from their phone issues to servers being down to not receiving their emails.

Ron Parrello, a Senior Consultant at Apis Consulting Group, notes how frustrating it was working in an environment with no IT department.

“Most issues were only minor in nature, but because we were reliant on one of the Project Directors, who was not always available, I tended to put up with the issue or find ways to work around it, creating great frustration.”
 
The level of support for a growing company spread across two states was simply inadequate and given IT was an everyday concern, Apis management realised the need to outsource to a service provider like RDA Group.

Objectives
Craig Johnson, Director of Innovation at Apis, had a clear objective to work with RDA in order to implement an outsourcing plan that would provide a solution to the company’s IT issues and ultimately reduce the amount of problems they were having.

“We were also intent on reducing the overall support costs through defining and planning for the implementation of a standard operating environment and gaining better robustness in our corporate ICT practices”, said Craig.

Action
In February 2007, RDA Group began discussions with Craig about how to better manage the IT environments in both Canberra and Brisbane. Additional to outsourcing, and as an answer to reducing the overall support costs, RDA Group strongly recommended the two servers from each location be virtualised.

The four servers were fully consolidated in May 2007 and placed in a secure data centre in Sydney to be monitored and maintained by RDA Group Network Systems Engineers. Both offices were then able to run smoothly from the same servers and subsequently Apis staff began to experience the positive effect on their IT environment.

Outcome
The IT problems at Apis have noticeably dropped since outsourcing and incorporating a VMware solution. During the last year, the team has increased to peak at over 100 staff so to seamlessly accommodate this growth in people, data and hardware is more than a desired outcome for both RDA and Apis.

“The service desk calls have decreased and that is testament to the virtualisation of their servers”, said Geordie Guy, Senior Systems Engineer at RDA Group.

Having a service provider available to help with their everyday technical issues has solved the majority of the frustration felt by Ron Parrello, his colleagues and management at Apis.

“It has been excellent - I use RDA like any other IT help desk and feel comfortable to call for the simplest of issues just so I find a quick resolution to my problem”, said Ron.

“The service I have received personally has been beyond my expectations. The technicians stay with me until they resolve the problem and recommend corrective action.”

“On one occasion the help continued over a few days, including a weekend. I dealt with three different engineers from three different states, but the support was seamless. They all knew what the previous had done and followed up on the last actions to resolve the issue.”

There has been some recent structural change within Apis, however RDA Group is still servicing the entire team in both Canberra and Brisbane.
 
“Despite the change in our organisation, it has been invaluable to have RDA remain consistent as our reliable and professional IT service provider”, said Craig.