Download PDF
Ratcliff IT Success Story
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Security Compliance
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Cybersecurity Services
The Challenge
Ratcliff IT faced the challenge of moving beyond commodity support to offer differentiated expertise and services. The company struggled to build deeper relationships with clients while their top technical minds were occupied with routine tasks like programming RMM tools and reading logs. This situation hindered their ability to add value as a trusted partner. Ratcliff IT needed a solution that would allow them to focus on more strategic activities and build a sustainable, scalable business. They evaluated various management options and found that Continuum Command offered the best service on the market. The goal was to free up their staff from background support tasks so they could concentrate on adding value to their clients.
About The Customer
Ratcliff IT is a U.K.-based managed service provider (MSP) that aims to deliver high-quality IT services to its clients. The company focuses on building strong relationships with its customers by providing reliable and efficient IT support. Ratcliff IT is committed to using best-in-class tools and services to ensure excellence in their offerings. The company has a strong emphasis on security services and aims to differentiate itself from other MSPs by building a robust security practice. Ratcliff IT is also focused on helping small businesses leverage cloud technologies through a hybrid cloud strategy. The company values predictability in costs and margins, which allows them to manage their business more effectively and pursue new opportunities.
The Solution
Ratcliff IT implemented Continuum Command to handle background support tasks through a Network Operations Center (NOC). This allowed their staff to focus on adding value as trusted partners rather than being bogged down by routine tasks. In addition to Continuum Command, Ratcliff IT developed a strong security practice backed by Continuum Fortify and the Continuum Security Operations Center (SOC). The integrated portal for both NOC and SOC simplified operations, enabling the team to learn one system and apply it across different tools. This approach ensured that Ratcliff IT could deliver consistent excellence in their services, meeting client expectations and building trust. The fixed costs and pay-as-you-grow model of Continuum allowed Ratcliff IT to predict and manage gross margins for each client, providing a firm foundation for business expansion.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Factor-y S.r.l. – Establishes a cost-effective, security-rich development environment with SoftLayer technology
Factor-y S.r.l., a web portal developer, was faced with the challenge of migrating its development infrastructure to a reliable cloud services provider with highly responsive technical support. The company needed a solution that would not only provide a secure and reliable environment but also support its expansion by providing resources to create and deliver innovative offerings.
Case Study
UBM plc: Taking the pulse of the business and engaging employees with a far-reaching strategic transformation
UBM, a leading global events business, was undergoing a significant strategic transformation named 'Events First'. As part of this transformation, the company was preparing to complete the largest acquisition in its history - Advanstar, a US-based events and marketing services business valued at more than USD970m. The company faced the risk of human capital flight if it was unable to effectively engage top talent with the new strategic direction. UBM needed to make significant structural, process and systems changes, uniting its previously autonomous regional businesses. The challenge was to ensure all of its employees were engaged and aligned with the new future vision.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Wittmann EDV-Systeme launches IT monitoring services
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the know-how and resources required for thorough IT system monitoring. Wittmann EDV-Systeme wanted to launch a solution to plug the gap – enabling it to improve its own competitiveness and that of its customers. IT landscapes are becoming ever more complex and outsourcing is gaining popularity, IT systems must nonetheless remain easy-to-use and extremely reliable at all times. Automated, round-the-clock system monitoring therefore represents an immensely valuable proposition for companies: downtime for business-critical applications can be avoided, and IT systems remain available at all times.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.