WPS specialises in offering their clients the best advice and service in their respective fields. With an annual billion dollar turnover and a strong employee base, new additions to soon join the WPS group of companies include WPS Legal Services and WPS Taxation Services.

The Wright Patton Shakespeare group of companies include:

• WPS Home Loans 
• WPS Reality 
• WPS Financial Services
• WPS Law
• WPS Motor Sports

Flexibility and Agility Required 

Over the past eight years Wright Patton Shakespeare has experienced exceptional growth, expanding the business from Financials Services, to realty, law and motor racing. As such a flexible and agile technology platform is essential in order to meet the requirements of a business with diversified interests.

A critical factor involved in Wright Patton Shakespeare’s decision to engage an IT Service Provider was to find a partner that could facilitate a wide range of changing requirements. Access to the latest technologies to assist Wright Patton Shakespeare in maintaining a competitive advantage was crucial. For a fast growing business the ability to determine an ‘actual’ cost of I.T was deemed essential.

Long Term Relationship

BlueFire has been servicing Wright Patton Shakespeare for over 8 years. In that time both organizations have experienced growth and have developed a deep organizational relationship enabling BlueFire to obtain a thorough and ongoing understand of Wright Patton Shakespeare’s growing and fast changing Business requirements.

Management at Wright Patton Shakespeare have highlighted, accessibility is also an additional factor in continuing their engagement with Blue Fire. Being able to talk to a person who knows their environment is one of their best attributes for WPS.

Wright Patton Shakespeare site the fact that BlueFire is able to provide 24 x 7 support for users as well as providing a national support presence as a critical aspect of the relationship.

The Solution

Wright Patton Shakespeare operates the BlueFire Managed Services solution to meet their organisation requirements. The solution involves the deployment of a private IP network to all Wright Patton Shakespeare sites that connects all sites the BlueFire data centre.

All Wright Patton Shakespeare, 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.

Wright Patton Shakespeare users contact a dedicated service desk team who are fluent with their 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

Wright Patton Shakespeare users log in 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.

Wright Patton Shakespeare executives operate using laptops. This allows users in the office to operate using Citrix or the flexibility of operating locally on a laptop when out of the office. A simple internet connection provides laptop users complete access to business critical systems and data.

ROI

Management at Wright Patton Shakespeare have demonstrated significant cost savings by leveraging BlueFire Managed Services for security and WAN services. By outsourcing infrastructure management to BlueFire, Wright Patton Shakespeare has been able to keep personnel costs at a minimum.

Furthermore Wright Patton Shakespeare is able to accurately forecast future operational expenditure due to the ‘fixed’ cost per month pricing model.

By opting for an outsourced managed service, Wright Patton Shakespeare 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. 

BlueFire also spends the time investigating new technologies that can streamline business processes for Wright Patton Shakespeare and assist in maintaining competitive advantage in a hard fought industry.

Conclusion

By engaging BlueFire, Wright Patton Shakespeare has been able to meet organisational requirements of providing 24 by 7 support for their users. Likewise BlueFire afford Wright Patton Shakespeare the flexibility required in a fast move, competitive environment without having to be concerned with the intricacies of managing a complex I.T. environment. BlueFire Managed Services allows Wright Patton Shakespeare to focus on growing their core business with the knowledge that all aspects of their I.T. environment  are monitored and managed by BlueFire’s professional engineering and support teams.