Pinnacle helps Launch Diagnostics Ltd move to the cloud - and contribute to Europe's pandemic response

Pinnacle has been Launch Diagnostics’ technology partner for over 20 years, advising, and implementing on major strategic technology decisions and ensuring that the business has a modern and fit-for-purpose ongoing IT infrastructure. Like many businesses, a measured and planned move to cloud services made sense for Launch Diagnostics, but the business case came from a mix of circumstances. The in-house on-premise servers were running out of space, just as (and partly because) the business was growing.

The subscription model of Microsoft 365 was economically attractive and meant that the growing team would always have the latest Office software. Launch Diagnostics Technical Director, Ian Jones, says “We’ve used Pinnacle ever since the evolution of the company, and now they’ve been instrumental in moving us away from on-premise technology to hosted services and Office 365, where we’ve seen significant benefits in terms of working efficiencies.

We see the advantages of a subscription-based service, where we know we’ll get constant software updates. Using Teams, creating channels for particular discussion groups, allows us to really maximise our daily workload. Being able to update documents in real-time, on the fly, is a particularly big advantage for our field Sales and Technical teams. We’ve seen the trend to cloud across our industry – we didn’t want to get left behind.” The decision was therefore made in Spring 2020 to move to the Cloud, with Microsoft 365 with full on-site and off-site backups a priority to roll out.

The cloud migration was planned across the Spring and executed by August 2020 – and has proved to be one of the best decisions the company has made.

During this time, it was, of course, forced to readjust to operating under pandemic conditions, with many staff working remotely. Cloud connectivity would allow employees to stay connected, work effectively and have constant access to the documents they need to run the business.

But Launch Diagnostics also found itself on the front line of the pandemic response. As a provider of medical diagnostic testing products to the Health Services of the United Kingdom, ROI, France and Belgium, the business has expanded dramatically due to the demand for Accurate, Precise, Sensitive and Specific COVID-19 diagnostic test kits and associated equipment that Launch were able to supply to its customers. It has had to grow in staff, activities, and distribution networks to provide support to Europe’s COVID response – and the IT has had to grow to accommodate those needs, too.

“We’ve been flat out since March”, says Ian. “Staff who have not been required to work from an office environment have worked from home, but essential operational/logistic staff like warehouse, distribution, engineering and application employees who have been preparing equipment ready or installation for COVID testing have all been on-site to support the National DHSC COVID-19 testing strategy. Having the Office 365 setup has allowed our team to work wherever they need to be. I think we would have really struggled without it.”