Servers Virtualized, Growth Realised

“Seamless IT is essential. Thanks to BTG, we don’t have to worry about it.”

A solid, profitable and thriving business prior to the Christchurch earthquakes, Mike Greer Homes has doubled within 18 months, and, at the time of writing, had close to 100 staff. With 4 locations in the South Island and growing, plans to head north, and 500+ house and land packages sold in the past year, Mike Greer Homes is booming.

We spoke with Richie McFerran, Mike Greer Homes’ Christchurch General Manager about bringing their IT up to speed…

“We have now introduced Mike Greer Homes Hills and Architectural to specialise in the hills and architectural environments. We obviously have our North Canterbury branch, Christchurch, there’s the West Coast, Queenstown, and we are going in to Auckland. So the business is expanding.”

The challenge – Fast growth leaving the IT behind.

Mike Greer Homes joined BTG in late 2012 and signed on with BTG’s premium service solution, ManageIT in June of 2013. Large growth in a short space of time has presented a number of issues for their IT. Large data and its storage had become a problem. Exchange was being used as a filing system. BTG Christchurch have conducted a substantial ‘clean up’ and planned around projected growth and also focussed on creating a simplified IT environment.

“Seamless IT is essential. We want it seamless behind the scenes. Thanks to BTG, we don’t want to have to worry about it.”

Solution – a suite of upgrades across the board

Infrastructure upgrade – new hardware was installed that was appropriate to current requirements, with plenty of upgrade paths to allow for any future requirements.
Virtualisation – physical servers were migrated to virtual servers to allow for reduced resource requirement, cost and simplified management.
SBS Migration – Microsoft Small Business Server was migrated to full Active Directory, Exchange and File servers allowing for larger user numbers and growth.
Licence Audit – To ensure Mike Greer Homes was compliant for Microsoft licensing, a site audit was completed and the client was moved to a more appropriate license program.
Procurement – BTG have implemented a streamlined process so that hardware and software requirements can be seamlessly catered to.
Disaster Recovery and Backup Replication – Data is backed up and then replicated up to the BTG Auckland data centre and full servers can be recovered and available in minutes.

Richie says the business goes through its ‘burst patches’.

“With the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, all of a sudden we needed to get three more project managers, and we have structured our department slightly differently. We have opened up a whole other department that wasn’t there previously.”

BTG continue to work closely with the business, and the Christchurch-based software company who service their main line of business application, Hummer.

To find out more information on BTG and our solutions call our Christchurch office on +64 3 741 2100.

BTG Case Study

The challenge – Fast growth leaving the IT behind.

Solution – a suite of upgrades across the board

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