Few businesses are exempt from the pressure of rising expectations and getting results faster. Today’s customers have a growing demand for innovation and personalised services - they want customised solutions with reliability. But with an unlimited choice of service providers it can be difficult to find the right partner.
BDO Australia, one of the world’s leading accountancy and business advisory organisations, is focused on exceptional client service and responsiveness. With the development of new service lines to meet client needs, BDO needed the right partner to keep them at the forefront of innovation for their clients and employees. This led them to Cisco to help them expand their value-add by incorporating new technology and efficiencies.
According to BDO Brisbane’s Chief Information Officer Nick Brant, while the technology infrastructure at the company’s Brisbane data centre had served it well for many years, by 2017 its performance was falling behind what the company needed.
“We were seeing application and performance pressure,” Brant says. “We were getting to a stage where the current storage was old, and disks were being replaced hand-over-fist, and the speed of the disks was not very good.”
While these problems were causing extra work for the IT team, Brant says large-scale tasks such as financial modelling and reporting were taking longer than was desirable, which would have consequences for client service levels if not addressed.
“So we needed to upgrade and rearchitect our infrastructure to alleviate those pressures,” Brant says.
The situation was not helped by BDO’s infrastructure being based on technology from three different suppliers.
“It was affecting lots of process and performance, from the top down,” Brant says. “So everyone was aware of the issues and constraints we were faced with.”
All of this was constraining the IT team’s ability to respond with the agility that the business required. It was critical then for BDO to make the right decision in terms of an upgrade that would suit its long-term requirements for responsiveness and reliability.
