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Nizza places e-mail in a new position
When your entire business depends on e-mail, you can't afford for anything to go wrong with it. This requirement -- and the growing complexity of managing e-mail across its expanding network of offices -- drove Brisbane-based Nizza Recruitment Group to a managed e-mail solution that has dramatically improved the way the company functions.
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An engineering recruitment specialist firm based in Brisbane, in recent years Nizza has seen a major change in the way its 40 employees handle their daily business. Face-to-face interaction has gradually given way to an increasingly e-mail-based business, with potential job candidates invariably submitting electronic resumes that are not only reviewed, but archived in the long term.
Although Nizza had previously managed its Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail inhouse, the rapidly expanding size of its employees' electronic mailboxes had increased the complexity of the solution and led to some major issues when new offices in Singapore and Perth (which specialises in mining recruitment) were opened.
Those sites were each running their own Microsoft Exchange server, but lack of integration between the three offices hindered the smooth flow of information within the business. Access was equally ponderous for a Scottish affiliate specialising in oil and gas industry recruitment.
"With our own server, it would be fine for about a year and then we'd end up getting too big for it again," said Nizza general manager Alex Tervit. "We have a lot of people with [.PST files] of 2GB in size, and they're getting new resumes all day and often store them in their Outlook mailboxes. All together, we had around 75GB stored on the system, and it was finding it difficult to cope with that much."
As the growing scale of its e-mail system threatened to get the better of it, Nizza made a dramatic change. Working with its existing systems integrator, Bluewave, Nizza set up a plan to migrate its existing data to WebCentral's managed e-mail service, which is resold by Bluewave to its own customers.
This effort proved far from simple, given the massive amount of data involved. "Even WebCentral were a little staggered at the size of the database," laughed Tervit. "They didn't allot enough time for the migration."
After more than two days, however, Nizza's data had been moved into the WebCentral datacentre, which offers a massive array of servers and databases that have been designed to scale to immense heights. Given the scalability that has been engineered into that architecture, the addition of Nizza's e-mail database barely registered a blip -- but it immediately began solving problems for the company.
No matter where they are in the world, all of Nizza's employees have now pointed their Outlook clients at the managed Exchange server, pulling down their information much more quickly than in the past. Importantly given the company's expanding footprint, all of the company's employees are now working from the same e-mail and calendar information.
Ready access to key information -- and the knowledge that the company's data is both well-managed and backed up regularly -- has quickly proven the value of managed e-mail. So, too, has the company's ability to reduce its server count from four to three.
Managed e-mail is "a reasonably cost-effective solution", said Tervit. "On a yearly basis, we're looking at less than AU$10,000 for a reasonable-sized company like ours. That's nothing [compared to paying] for an IT guy to come in and constantly upgrade the system, and worry about it. Bluewave were spending a lot of time working on our e-mail system, but now they can concentrate more on the real things."
Shifting towards a managed e-mail service has not only made life easier for Nizza, but it has also become a key element of the company's push to mobilise its Blackberry-styled devices. They are supported automatically, with the managed RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server running at WebCentral's premises. And, with the ability to check e-mail over the Web, Tervit and Nizza's other highly mobile employees are able to keep up with their e-mail no matter where they travel.
"We're moving to a totally Web-based business, whereby all of our employees can work from home and don't have any of the usual problems you have in doing that," said Tervit. "We're outsourcing all the problems we would have had in doing this. We were going to have to continuously upgrade ours, all the time, but [the managed service] just takes away the need to do that."
