Overview:
Liquid Intelligent Technologies has helped Cairns Holdings move essential functions into the cloud by managing its migration to Microsoft Office 365, and has also supplied the network connectivity to make the suite work securely and dependably.
The customer:
Cairns Foods is a leading manufacturer and distributor of food and beverage products in both local and export markets.Formerly known as Cairns Holdings, Cairns Foods started out as a motorcar distribution company in the 1920s. From the 1970s, the group experienced major growth following the acquisition of several large companies in Zimbabwe at that time.
The group has since merged its operations into one company; Cairns Foods. All of Cairns Foods products are produced locally in its manufacturing plants in Harare, Mutare, and Marondera and home to over 1500 employees.With such a large employee base, it is critical to ensure that the right tools are deployed to ensure productivity and seamless collaboration.
Challenges:
Like many businesses, Cairns felt the need to move away from reliance on licensed software managed in-house. It realised that the best solution would be to move certain familiar tools into the cloud so that its staff could access them from any location and at any time.
This would remove the burden of continued capital expenditure on hardware and software and gain from a predictable monthly charge for all its IT needs. But it needed to marry this migration to the cloud with the right network solution so as to ensure a connection that its staff could rely on. It also wanted a solution that could be paid for locally to save the complexity of making overseas payments.
Solutions:
Liquid Intelligent Technologies has supplied Cairns with Microsoft Office 365, along with connectivity needed to make the applications fly, and already employees have benefitted from secure access to a suite of market-leading applications based in the cloud.
The organisation no longer has to maintain expensive physical infrastructure to run those applications, or pay for annual software licenses. It wanted a solution that was paid for locally, and with Liquid Intelligent Technologies as the source of both its software tools and the network over which they run, it has that one simple local point of contact.
The tools at its disposal include familiar desktop favourites like Word, PowerPoint and Excel, as well as Skype for Business with its web conferencing abilities, Outlook for all email needs, SharePoint to give staff the ability to collaborate over documents and share content with each other, and all the additional online storage that it could need through OneDrive for Business.
Results:
Cairns describes its mission as ‘leveraging technology to bring positive change to organisations in Africa’. With Liquid Intelligent Technologies as a partner, it is now able to focus on that task without the distraction of managing upgrades to hardware and software. Workers are delighted with the freedom they now enjoy, and company managers are happy with the efficiencies and synergies that have resulted.
Testimonial:
“Liquid Intelligent Technologies has supported us well throughout the process. Using Liquid Intelligent Technologies for both connectivity and the supply of cloud-based services has given us guaranteed connectivity. We’d use them again.”
