The Brooklyn Group is fast becoming a leading brand in the provision of executive recruitment services to some of the world’s leading blue-chip organisations, public sector corporations and not-for-profits across the Australian marketplace. With an annual turnover of $25 million and a continually growing employee base of 70 staff, The Brooklyn Group works with clients across a wide range of industries, at all levels of seniority within permanent and contract recruitment.

A New Challenge 

Historically, The Brooklyn Group has showed strong national growth since its inception in February 2004. It has become apparent that in order to drive growth it was critical to partner with an established and experienced I.T provider who is capable of handling such growth.

One of the most important factors involved in The Brooklyn Group’s decision to engage an IT Service Provider was to find a partner that could facilitate their planned national growth. For a fast growing business the ability to determine an ‘actual’ cost of I.T was critical. The management at Brooklyn Group knew that the selected I.T. partner had to be able to grow with the Brooklyn Group in order for the relationship to succeed.

Selection Criteria

The Brooklyn Group looked at several I.T. service providers including Dimension Data. As a startup company at the time other Managed Services competitors were not interested in providing service to The Brooklyn Group. BlueFire was prepared to invest in the initial relationship taking a long term view that both organisations would grow together.

The Brooklyn Group considered options such as:

• Predictable cost of IT over the term of the engagement.
• Proven track record in the Managed Services market space. 
• Ability to provide ‘best of breed’ technology platform 
• Ability to form a long-term working relationship/partnership.

The Solution

The Brooklyn selected the BlueFire Managed services solution to meet their organisation requirements. The solution involves the deployment of a private IP network to all Brooklyn Group sites that connects all sites the BlueFire data centre.

All Brooklyn applications, data and email are hosted and served to users from the data centre. All file, email, WAN communications and critical services are implemented in clustered configurations ensuring high availability and minimising the possibility of down time.

Brooklyn users contact a dedicated service desk team who are fluent with the Brooklyn environment and are able to resolve issues in a timely manner. This is enforced via a service level agreement that imposes financial penalties on BlueFire for failure to meet agreed service levels. 

The Experience

Brooklyn Group users login to their environment via a Wyse terminal from the remote locations directly to the BlueFire datacentre using Citrix MetaFrame. Users therefore log into an individual desktop that is located on the server in the data centre. This ensures that BlueFire can backup all user and shared data and protect customer infrastructure behind an enterprise security architecture.

Users are able to access all data, email and applications from the desktop without the potential loss of data and downtime that comes with the use of PCs.

All Brooklyn Group users operate within a standard operating environment enabling Brooklyn Group management to ensure users operate within pre-determined company policies and procedures.

ROI

Using BlueFire the Brooklyn Group is able to accurately forecast growth. By opting for an outsourced managed service, Brooklyn Group is not required to make constant investment in repairing and upgrading PC’s and servers. Replacement and repair of all infrastructure is BlueFire’s responsibility and is covered in the monthly fee. 

Furthermore Brooklyn Group have avoided the enormous opportunity cost of wasted time and effort in setting up and administering a ‘best of breed’ technology environment. This has allowed the Brooklyn Group to focus on what they do best, ‘Executive Placements.’

Conclusion

By engaging BlueFire, Brooklyn Group has been able to meet organisational growth requirements without having to be concerned with the intricacies of managing a complex I.T. environment. BlueFire managed services allows the Brooklyn Group to focus on growing their core business with the knowledge that all aspects of their I.T. environment  are monitored and managed 24x7 by BlueFire’s professional engineering and support teams.