Cloud Plus and Surety IT overhaul ICT environment for John Deere dealer Chesterfield Australia

Surety IT has teamed up with Cloud Plus to completely refresh the ICT environment at Chesterfield Australia.

Chesterfield Australia is a farming equipment dealership with 16 remote offices in New South Wales and Queensland, many of which are in regional and rural areas.

The company wanted a refresh of its existing hosted ICT, a hybrid solution that was not suited to Chesterfield's growing needs. The hosted infrastructure consisted of file servers, applications servers and a Microsoft Exchange server, with a mix of thick and thin clients. The number of thick clients in use compounded issues with network performance, raising concerns about the risk of data loss.

Chesterfield sought an IT environment that would not only empower staff to achieve more, but also be able to work on remote sites.

Chesterfield tapped Surety IT, which in turn reached out to Cloud Plus to help with the project. The two companies set about designing a solution that would meet Chesterfield's requirements.

Surety IT and Cloud Plus' aim was to provide a comprehensive solution that could be adapted and scaled as Chesterfield's needs changed over time.

Cloud Plus deployed its private IP WAN with IP QoS support as the foundation for the new environment, giving priority to voice and mission-critical data applications. The two companies also rolled out Cloud Plus' managed firewall, virtual hosting, virtual server backup and disaster recovery services. A wide range of vendor solutions were used including Cisco, Brocade, Fortinet, SuperMicro, Nexenta, VMware, Microsoft, Trend Micro and Veeam.

Since the new environment was deployed, Chesterfield has gained back approximately 15 percent of its workforce hours across 220 staff. Overall business productivity improved and Chesterfield's IT team were able to complete projects they didn't previously have time for.

With the new environment, average customer wait time on invoices has reduced significantly, down to seven seconds from peaks of 20 minutes.

Chesterfield manager corporate services Sue Owen said: "Since we started working with Surety IT, we have been able to make sure that the people who are at the front face of the business, out with the customers in paddocks, are connected to our servers and our network and have the information they need readily accessible. That is a massive step forward in how we operate."

Chesterfield signed a five-year managed services agreement with Surety IT and Cloud Plus for the initial solution, but additional services are progressively being added over time as the solution scales up.

Surety IT and Cloud Plus are finalists in the Working Together category at the 2017 CRN Impact Awards. The full list of finalists was announced at our CRN Pipeline conference in Melbourne on 22-23 March and can be found here. The winners will be announced at the Impact Awards dinner during the CRN Pipeline conference in Sydney on 6-7 April.

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