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Bigfish nets e-mail improvements
As an IT services provider, Melbourne-based Bigfish Technology focuses on providing services to help its clients get the most out of technology. As a user of technology itself, the company faces similar goals for its own employees -- and has found the managed e-mail service it offers customers to be a significant boon to its own operations.
Snapshot on Bigfish Technology
- Industry
- Employees
- Operations
- Financials
Systems integration
With just five employees, the six-year-old company specialises in providing solutions to small and medium businesses (SMBs) -- those with up to around 100 computers. Within this market, said managing director Tristan Ellet, clients often face major problems stemming from simple issues of geography.
One client, for example, was struggling to keep up with his e-mails and needed a way to give his secretary access to the messages -- which came in through four different e-mail addresses -- no matter where he and she were travelling. Another was a husband-and-wife team that wanted to share their e-mail and contacts through their smartphones.
Bigfish managing director Tristan Ellet.
In both cases, Bigfish helped its clients get set up with a hosted Microsoft Exchange service from infrastructure provider YourASP. At the same time, however, Bigfish was looking for a way to improve its own employees' access to each other, particularly given their continuous movement between clients.
"On any given day, our staff are on the road anywhere in Victoria," said Ellet. "If we were fixed in one location, having our own inhouse server would be appropriate. But after we looked at doing it ourselves, timewise and costwise it didn't make sense -- so we looked at using a hosted environment."
That environment, also built around YourASP's hosted Exchange service, has changed the way the team communicates with clients and with each other. Mobile Bigfish employees use their Palm Treo PDAs to regularly access mail, while access via Telstra Big Pond's Next-G data cards brings their notebooks into the fold as well.
One major benefit of the hosted solution, which stores all e-mail on a single central server and provides seven mail accounts to Bigfish all told, is the ability to synchronise relevant information from other peoples' folders. This capability, for example, allows Ellet to see what all of the company's support technicians are doing on any given day.
"This is very handy in the service industry," he said. "With sharing, we can access that information anywhere. Everything you've ever sent or deleted, is available from anywhere in the world."
YourASP wasn't the first hosted Exchange solution Bigfish tried. Its initial foray into the market landed a service provider that wasn't actually aware of how its technology worked -- making ongoing service and confidence hard to obtain. A second company was ditched after a systems crash caused a 12-hour service outage. But YourASP's solution has proven solid for Bigfish throughout more than a year of continuous use -- confirming its value both for the company and for its clients.
Although the managed service is relatively straightforward, Ellet is quick to point out that many of the same rules apply as do for a more complicated IT systems implementation.
"There are a whole lot of benefits depending on where it fits into your business, but set-up and training are important parts of it as well," he explained. "We're not just selling hosted e-mail; we're selling an ongoing solution that works in the way users want to access information. That's why we use it ourselves as a customer; we just don't have time to spend managing our e-mail servers."
