Viticulture and horticulture labour specialists, Thornhill Horticultural Contracting, are one of the leading companies sourcing and supplying labour for the Hawke’s Bay and Marlborough fruit, vegetable and grape growing industries.
For over 15 years Thornhill have been providing a professional all round service to their clients’ needs by placing skilled, trained and reputable staff from management positions through to experienced workers in the field. Working with growers, vineyard and orchard managers, they’ve helped fill thousands of positions in the industry since 2004.
Poorly performing servers suck
In April 2019 Chris and Phil from Devine Technology met with Thornhill owner-operators Drew and Nick to discuss their current IT systems and how well they we were working for the business.
It was revealed that Thornhill’s three Windows servers, hosted by an offshore provider and supported by a local IT firm, were performing poorly. And sometimes the servers didn’t perform at all!
Thornhill’s staff members were experiencing regular internet connection latency – the slowness, stalling and general lagging we all know is plain annoying when trying to work online.
Slow servers = reduced productivity
This latency was proving very counter-productive as it was impacting staff members’ ability to complete work on time, which in turn was affecting Thornhill’s bottom-line, and potentially their reputation in the industry.
Chris and Phil from Devine explained that Thornhill’s servers needed to be hosted by a cloud provider that could offer a faster and more reliable connection. Enter Devine Technology with their superior offering of cloud computing services.
They went on to explain that hosting Thornhill’s servers in the ‘Devine Cloud’ (physical server hardware located and hosted in Hawke’s Bay) would result in a further, and dramatic, increase in server reliability and performance due to closer geographical proximity.
Before we started working with Devine our servers were annoyingly slow, they regularly stalled, and sometimes they weren’t accessible at all. We approached several other local technology companies but none were able to solve our server issues. Then we engaged with Devine and everything was sorted in a few weeks.
Nick Bibby – Owner / Operator – Thornhill Horticultural Contracting
What sets Devine Technology apart?
One of Devine’s major points-of-difference, one what sets them apart from their competitors, is that they assign a primary IT consultant to every one of their clients. What’s more, this consultant can be contacted directly, any time they’re needed.
Having a dedicated IT consultant who takes complete ownership of the services being provided to a client provides the client with peace-of-mind, in the knowledge someone is always there to look after them, however big or small their IT issue.
Migrating Thornhill to the Devine Cloud
Once Thornhill came onboard with Devine their server content was migrated (moved) over from their existing provider to the Devine Cloud server room based in Hawke’s Bay.
This resulted in an immediate boost to Thornhill’s productivity with the Devine Cloud’s locally-hosted and carefully configured servers instantly working substantially quicker with no lagging, random stalling and definitely no grinding to a complete halt!
Not only did Devine Technology transform Thornhill’s server requirements, they also reloaded and streamlined the staff’s laptops to run faster, more efficiently and smoother alongside their new server speeds.
When it came to migrating our systems, software and content over to Devine’s servers everything went off without a hitch. The Devine guys carried out the migration over the weekend so by Monday we were all up and running with no downtime or teething issues whatsoever.
Nick Bibby – Owner / Operator – Thornhill Horticultural Contracting
At the end of the day business results matter
In the months following Devine ‘sorting out’ Thornhill’s technology woes with superior solutions, the feedback from management and staff can best be summed up with a collective sigh of relief!
Thornhill staff were able to carry out their business activity with much higher confidence thanks mostly to the enhanced server performance, which also enabled them to migrate other employees to remote desktops.
And, when any server issues did arise, Thornhill knew they always had direct access to their very own IT consultant just by picking up the phone or firing off an email.
And the icing on the cake? In the 12 months following the migrating to the Devine Cloud, Thornhill made a cost savings of $6,000 on hosting costs alone. Then there’s the time saved with the superior speed and reliability o
After we started working with Devine and our servers were being hosted locally, suddenly our workflow was so much smoother and everything ran faster. And if we ever have questions or issues with our system we can contact Craig, our very own Devine technology consultant, direct via email or phone.
Nick Bibby – Owner / Operator – Thornhill Horticultural Contracting
Find out more about Thornhill on their website and Facebook page:
www.thornhill.co.nz
www.facebook.com/thornhillhorticulture