IT Support Services
The Challenges
IDIQ contracts are most often issued to streamline the budgeting, services and procurement processes, allowing organizations to appropriate funds for a specific time period for a specific facility, but flexible to the facility’s needs (i.e., $3 million for three years to fund a school’s maintenance as required). For contracts of this type, it is essential that budgets are tightly monitored and that up-to-date accounting information is available upon demand not only to BasicIDIQ’s financial team, but to the organization’s contracting supervisors as well.
Since its establishment in 2002, BasicIDIQ grew so rapidly that its network services had not caught up to the company’s job site expansion from Texas into New Mexico, Arkansas and Oklahoma; moreover, the network was not well suited to the needs of remote workers. The home server was based in Austin, but it was cobbled together with quick-fix solutions for bandwidth, remote access, storage and backup.
John Carr, CFO for BasicIDIQ, is one of the company’s remote workers. While he was happy with the robustness of Intuit’s QuickBooks for Enterprise, he found that he was often unable to concentrate on the company’s finances – he was the default IT troubleshooter for the network hardware and software.
“I spent half of my time doing server maintenance due to the many problems with employee access,” Carr explained. “And with multiple staff members needing access to QuickBooks, and even more staff needing access to a centralized system for contract notes and information, my job was problematic. I hoped that a cloud-based solution could be found that would deliver not only 24×7 access to QuickBooks, but that could provide the secure document storage and information sharing needed by dispersed construction management teams.”
The Solution
After evaluating several product offerings, Carr selected Swizznet’s QuickBooks Hosting for Businesses as the ideal solution for meeting his needs. This hosting and online accounting solution ties the versatility of Intuit’s QuickBooks with Citrix’s technology and the reliability of Swizznet for fast, secure online access to any file or application. With Swizznet’s QuickBooks Hosting for Business, all employees – on site and remote – can stay connected for collaborative efforts and can connect to the cloud 24×7 via any computer or mobile device.
Swizznet is the only hosted provider that backs up all data every 30 minutes and that offers U.S.- based technical support…two points that Carr was quick to praise.
“Competitive products offered support via email, but nothing beats talking to a real person when you’ve got a problem,” he said. “This was very important to us, particularly since our users are so dispersed. There’s no getting around a problem when the local Internet connection is down, but Swizznet is not the problem…it’s accessible almost 100 percent of the time.”
Carr added that he selected Swizznet based on value, response time, personal attention and follow up. In fact, at the initiation of its subscription, he was pleasantly surprised that Swizznet was able to migrate BasicIDIQ’s voluminous files to the cloud solution over a weekend, eliminating any disruption to business.
“Our employees thought Swizznet seemed almost too good to be true,” Carr recalled. “But their skepticism dissipated when they saw how quickly they could now access their files and work documents.”
The Results
“Swizznet has enabled me to transition from managing a server to managing a business,” he said. Additionally, he noted:
New users can be quickly authorized.
No real systems training is required; Swizznet is seamless to QuickBooks users.
Online access is virtually assured since Swizznet has little down time.
