Case Study - Cellarvino Ltd. The Auction House, Luton

Cellarvino are one of the UK's largest drinks companies solely dedicated to the Independent drinks industry. Founded in 2000, the company now boast a turnover in excess of £15 Million and supply a range of quality wines, beers and spirits to distributors and retailers throughout the UK. 

CellarVino also have the first exclusive on trade wine range Sentina, this striking Italian range is available in Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Soave, Bianco, Pinot Grigio Rose, Rosso, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Valpolicella and Chianti. 

The Auction House is owned and run by the same owners and is a Premier Conference Centre that can accommodate up to 800 guests or delegates for occasions such as Weddings, Parties, Conferences, Summer Balls or Christmas Parties, whatever the occasion the Central Luton based venue will greet you and your guests for an unforgettable experience.

The IT Support Department have been working with CellarVino since October 2010 when we took over the support and administration of their computers, servers and IT infrastructure.

In April 2011 Cellarvino asked us to recommend a solution for their email system, at the time they were running Microsoft servers in the back office and Outlook clients on their office PC's.

We recommended switching to Google Apps for Business, at just £33.00 per user per year it represented considerable savings plus giving a 99.9% uptime guarantee, cloud based technology and minimal disruption to the end users as they would still be using Microsoft Outlook as their Email Client.

You can see their testimonial letter here, click to enlarge.

Most businesses nowadays rely heavily on internet connectivity and email as a vital part of communicating with customers and suppliers so, following our site survey and risk assessment, we agreed to make the change over a weekend. This meant that on Friday evening we were able to start the transfer and by the Monday morning, all of the email accounts had been propagated, set up and tested ready for the start of the working week.

Our staff attended the premises on the Monday morning to talk the users through any queries or concerns they had with the new system. However, as we retained Microsoft Outlook as the main email client, there were no such issues and the project ran smoothly as expected.

Similarly, adding email, calendar and contacts to the smartphones was also a quick and smooth transition and now staff can access business email in the office, on their phones and any computer with internet access.

Cellarvino staff can also take advantage of the other benefits of using Google Apps for business such as document sharing and collaboration; for example groups of staff can all edit the same spreadsheet simultaneously and if necessary share documents outside of their domain with customers and suppliers.

We should also mention the cost savings and reliability of the new email system. The main choices came down to installing Microsoft Exchange, either as a standalone server or part of a Small Business Server. In either case, the new hardware ie. a server would be required plus of course the cost of the software and installation. Furthermore, should at any stage in the future their server suffer a failure say a power cut, fire or flood, then email would be interrupted just at a time when they would be relying on it the most.

Deploying Google Apps for business not only saved this capital outlay but also the ongoing cost of an additional server. As their server is now "in the Cloud" they will experience 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 access to email from anywhere in the world.

To visit the Cellarvino Website Click Here