Since Nostra was founded nine years ago, we have built up a customer base that spans a diverse range of sectors from aviation, hotels and facilities management to financial services, manufacturing and retail. What our customers have in common, regardless of industry, is a dependence on technology. They need stable IT systems and if a problem arises they need it fixed fast.
We believe that IT shouldn’t be complicated. Recognising our customers’ common need, we decided early on that rapid turnaround time would be a key point of differentiation. In practice, we did this by breaking one of the tried-and-trusted rules of technical support. We don’t operate a tiered model that puts technical expertise and knowledge at the furthest point from the customer. We took our senior engineers off the road and put them on the phone, so now, whenever a customer calls about a technical issue, they get access to our best resources on the first response, and get the fastest resolution possible.
Our objective is purely to simplify IT for our customers. That extends beyond support to strategy. Often, our customers ask us to assess and analyse the current state of their IT. From this, we then map out a plan to get their infrastructure to its desired future state so that it delivers the needs of the business now and into the future.
Following this initial evaluation, we report to the customer using plain English, so that everyone from board level downwards understands the proposed solution, and why we think it will work.
Too often businesses are trapped by the limitations of their technology, unable to respond quickly to changing circumstances. IT works best when it’s in the service of the business; and to achieve this we offer a hybrid model that often mixes on-premise IT with virtualisation, and public or private cloud technology – as appropriate to that particular business.
Reducing footprint
From the regular audits we carry out on our customers’ IT, we have found that many of them have overly complicated and unnecessary IT systems. The first thing we do in many cases is reduce the technology footprint. This can mean reducing the number of physical servers from 35 down to three or four. This often leads to immediate savings. Other times infrastructure may need replacing and this requires investment, but in many cases it’s possible to put in a system that is cheaper to own and operate than the one it replaced (by utilising Office 365 or another cloud solution) and, most importantly, there’s no wasted spend on IT.
A good example is a project that we are working on right now which, when completed, will be completely cost-neutral. We’re going to replace the current infrastructure – in this case, four high-end servers – with a solution that uses two of the boxes reconfigured to act as physical hosts for a series of virtual machines, which will be located in head office. To maximise the investment in the hardware the other two servers will go into a second site that will act as a backup location, providing high availability and disaster recovery. The customer has no additional spend except for engineering time and they will end up with more stable IT and a reliable business continuity solution, which is fast becoming a must-have for companies of all sizes.
At Nostra, we act as an independent consultant and as a result, this allows us to identify the most appropriate technology, design a solution around it, implement it, support it, and maintain it.
The aim at every stage is to take care of every aspect of our clients’ ICT throughout their entire lifecycle. Another part of our ‘simplify’ model involves helping to manage the relationship between our customers and their various technology suppliers such as accounts, software vendors or telecoms providers. We act as a liaison between them and the end customer ensuring a seamless level of service across providers.
It all comes back to simplicity. Business is complicated enough so IT shouldn’t add to the burden. We listen to our customers and we are actively seeking acquisitions in order to add managed print and CRM expertise to our team, in order to enhance the services we can offer to our customers and better serve their needs.
Kevin O’Loughlin is managing director of Nostra
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