Maven Case Study

Background

Since 2004 Maven has built a specialist business and significantfund base, through both organic growth and strategic acquisition,becoming recognised as one of the UK’s most active SME investors.The business now operates from a nationwide network of ten regionaloffices and manages in excess of 20 client funds, including sevenVCTs, the £35m Capital for Enterprise Fund A established by the UKGovernment and the £113m Scottish Loan Fund on behalf of theScottish Investment Bank.

Situation

The Maven Head Office is in Glasgow which also houses their ITservers, other offices are located in London and across the UK. Manyof their staff hot desk around the different locations – supported by aCisco network and telephone system but there were frustrations;

• VPN remote access – drop out, latency.• Support desk response times.
• Mobile devices not synching correctly.
• Video conferencing not installed and setup in London only.
• Cisco handsets not configured to use VOIP.

Maven Capital Partners was advised by the previous IT supportcompany to move their servers from head office to a local data centrebased in Glasgow, unfortunately this did not work and all officesencountered a variety of further issues. They also needed to upgradeand simplify their telephony system so that it was simple to use butadvanced enough to be ‘future proof’.It was imperative that the new systems be robust, dependable andsupported by a good level of service.

‘We have a long history with London Systems...we trust them with our multiple locations. Communication is alwaysvery good and the support team are excellent. We would recommend London Systems to any business.’ - Suzanne Lupton, Business Support Manager at Maven

Solution

London Systems met with Maven and also visited each office to see how they operated. They quickly identified a cloud/hosted network with fibre circuits running from each office back to the data centre and a managed telephony system because it offered maximum flexibility with no capital outlay.

London Systems tailored the perfect network and telephony system for Maven and coupled it with the ideal package of services and features to suit their requirements. New fibre circuits were installed at each office which link directly back to the data centre now situated in London, this also enabled one VOIP telephony system to be used across all offices which drove down costs.

The network was moved to a Windows 10 environment which in creased the performance of the database and Office applications and a Virtual Desktop technology was rolled out throughout the company.

Outcome

Using this technology has allowed central management of all desktops and control of applications plus and all data is now stored the London Systems Data Centre and not on local workstations -ensuring complete security.

• Tailored network and telephony system.
• No upfront capital expenditure with the hosted system.
• No maintenance costs.  
• Business continuity.
• Free office to office calls.
• Reduced cost using VoIP.