Chase Templeton Ltd

• Company name: Chase Templeton Ltd
• Company website: http://www.chasetempleton.co.uk/
• Date of work: 2008
• Case study type: Support and Development

Company Profile:

Chase Templeton has been helping people with their finances and insurance policies since 1994. Today we are one of the leading Insurance brokers and have over 71 branches throughout The UK.

Existing IT Structure:

A low specification Small Business Server, tape backup, no structured cabling, no network printing, half a dozen differently specified and ageing client computers. Backend database in use was a remotely hosted system running within a Citrix setup.

Existing IT Problems:

Server required frequent rebooting to ensure that client computers could access network resources. With no network printing or shared network resources, daily usage of the network was long winded, unreliable and frustrating for the end users. Client computers struggled to run most applications due partly to neglect and partly due to their age. The backend system being used did not completely fit Chase Templeton’s business model and was cumbersome and slow to use.

EvolvIT IT Support Solution:

Chase Templeton Ltd purchased one of our existing customers, Preferred Medical Ltd, whom we had a successful relationship from almost the beginning of their existence through to being sold to Chase Templeton. Chase Templeton on the back of this purchase had decided to move into larger premises and asked us to tender to upgrade their existing network infrastructure.

After a site survey of the existing equipment, it soon became clear that the reality was a new network was needed from the bottom up. Moving into a new building gave the opportunity to get this right from the start without migrating a whole load of problems from the old site to new.

We specified a new IBM server, installed in a rackmount cabinet with all the peripherals you would expect (backup, redundant power, network storage, network faxing). The backbone of the network ran using a gigabit switch with all clients and server using gigabit network cards.

We built and installed ten new client machines, and set up the entire network within the new building over a weekend before their move-in date. This included migrating all of their profiles, emails, data and backend systems over to the new hardware.

Preferred Medical Ltd had enjoyed the use of not only our Virtual IT product, but had contracted us to develop a backend database for them using Filemaker. This development was based around our OrganisIT package and had been heavily customised to fit with Preferred Medical’s business model.

Comparing Preferred Medical’s OrganisIT system to the current backend system in use, it was obvious that Chase Templeton needed to roll out OrganisIT to their main office for the whole company to use. We developed a migration tool to bring the data over, and over the Christmas break swapped the dependence on their existing system over to the custom OrganisIT package.

Post Installation:

We still look after all of Chase Templeton’s IT requirements, including hosting several websites and 25+ domain names. The development of the OrganisIT system has been pushed forward, seeing it now deployed to almost 100 agents across the UK. The originally specified server and network installation is still in use and showing good signs of giving the excellent long life we have come to expect from systems installed by EvolvIT.