The Customer
Higgins Group is one of the UK’s most successful private companies, (with a turnover of around £230m) with its operations split primarily between the New Homes and Construction Industry sectors. Higgins Group’s HQ is located at Debden in Essex and is housed in a cutting edge contemporary building that it constructed itself. The Company operates largely in the South of England with a total of some 400 employees spread throughout the organisation.
My name is Steve Horsfield, I am the director of IT for Higgins Partnerships PLC. We are a construction company based in Essex.
The Challenge
We have used Transputec’s services a few times, but the latest challenge we had was with IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
The Outcome
We outsourced Transputec as our main IT suppliers. They helped us move all of our 40 servers onto a private cloud in their data center. They now manage the day-to-day running of those servers and assist us with our hardware and software-related needs. We continue to liaise with Transputec for the additional servers that we need to be built.
We are generally are in touch with two people. We work and speak on a daily basis with Mark (Deputy Director of Sales). When we have any issues or need something built, we go to the service desk which is manned mainly by Anish (Service Delivery Manager).
I have known Transputec for almost 20 years and have used them in the three different companies that I’ve been with. The considerable length of time that we’ve been working with them has given us the confidence that they will do their best to deliver whatever we ask.
The total cost for the five-year contract is just under £1 million (approximately $1.3 million USD). We are also spending at least £20,000–£30,000 (approximately $27,000–$40,000 USD) a year on hardware with Transputec. The IaaS project started in February 2019, and we have an ongoing relationship with the team.
Our partnership has been running for the last two and a half years without any problems. Our migrated servers have also been working well based on the monthly KPI reports. Our uptime and downtime – along with other metrics that we use to ensure everything is functioning well – have been at a steady state.
Transputec documents everything so that we know where we are and what the process is. There are no hidden charges; they stick by the cost that they initially quoted. We work in an agile methodology, but I can’t remember the names of the tools that they use. We usually communicate over the phone or have face-to-face meetings, especially before COVID-19. They have a dedicated project manager with whom we have weekling meetings to ensure everything is going smoothly. When we have queries, we just call them and speak to them directly.
I like Transputec’s honesty. They are upfront about everything and they come directly to us with any questions. Trust is the biggest element in our success. We’re often nervous around other providers, but we never get that with Transputec. They always have our best interests at heart.
