Bringing IT and Sage support under one roof gives Eurogold a reliable platform for year on year growth

For growth on this scale to be sustainable, it’s essential that Eurogold’s underlying IT infrastructure is resilient and reliable. Technical Support Manager Jon Miller sums up the importance of IT to the business, “We’ve grown at a rate of knots in recent years. To help us manage this growth, we rely on Sage 200 and our broader networking infrastructure, which must work unfailingly every hour of every day.”

The business has around 45 general users of Microsoft Office tools accessing the company’s systems in day-to-day operations, including scanning some 5,000 invoices a month into Sage 200. There are 8 users of Sage 200 in the Accounts department, while managers business-wide depend on the system for up-to-date insight into how their area is performing.

Today Eurogold relies on Pinnacle as a single source of IT and Sage support and expertise, but this wasn’t always the case. Until a year ago Eurogold had two separate support providers, another Sage Partner supporting Sage 200 and a provider of a tenanted hosted IT platform.

Jon explains the problems created by this division of responsibility, “Dealing with multiple vendors is both troublesome and time-consuming. There was a lack of overall accountability; I ended up having to mediate between the two as they didn’t communicate with each other.”

Meanwhile, Eurogold’s IT infrastructure suffered from chronic issues such as deteriorating system performance and email instability. In one acute crisis, the tenanted platform was hit by a ransomware attack, putting the company’s IT systems out of action for a week. Once again, it proved impossible to get to the root of the problem.

With the business continuing to experience rapid incremental growth, this situation was insupportable. Jon went out to market, initially for an alternative support provider for the company’s IT infrastructure. It was at this point that he received a timely communication highlighting Pinnacle’s ability to provide a one-stop shop for Sage and IT support.

“My eyes lit up!” says Jon. “Furthermore, in addition to having the skills and resources to help us comprehensively, Pinnacle’s representatives were refreshingly down to earth when we met, unlike the three prospective providers who’d already given their pitch. Pinnacle questioned what we’d gained from using a cloud-based environment, and offered a different solution, that of bringing our IT systems back in house.”

Jon was impressed by Pinnacle’s honesty: “At no point did Pinnacle over-promise to get our business; rather they spelled out what we could realistically expect.”

Installing servers in-house might seem counter to the industry trend, but it proved the right decision. The company now owns its IT infrastructure, provisioned, maintained and supported by Pinnacle.

Praising the quality of the initial installation, Jon says it provided a solid foundation for excellent system performance in the months that followed: “The Pinnacle installation engineer went above and beyond to get it exactly right for us.”

Nearly a year on, the big differences of working with Pinnacle are in speed and uptime. Faster performance has improved the user experience, while the only down-time during the working day was for a few minutes to carry out a preventative measure. Whereas slow email frequently caused user frustration in the past, a move to Office 365, recommended and carried out by Pinnacle, has improved performance, without a single failure.

Pinnacle’s involvement has made Jon’s own life that bit easier, too: “If ever I took a day off in the past, I could guarantee the system would go down in my absence, and I never knew what I would face on my return to the office. I used to wonder what would go wrong next. With our Sage 200 systems and networking infrastructure in Pinnacle’s safe hands, I arrive in the morning confident that everything will be running smoothly.”

Pinnacle has also equipped Jon with software security tools through which he can monitor the company’s laptop estate, including those of employees based on around seventy customer sites. He can manage the Sophos anti-virus service from his office using Sophos Agent without needing to visit customer sites, avoiding the considerable cost and inconvenience associated with travel. As a further business continuity measure, data is regularly backed up to the cloud.

Pinnacle monitors Eurogold’s IT remotely in order to pre-empt problems and identify opportunities for continuous improvement. This means that Jon rarely needs to contact the Pinnacle support team. However, as he points out, “Pinnacle’s proactive support is second to none, and it’s good to know they’re only ever a phone call away.”