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Alliotts Chartered Accountants and Business Advisors are a leading independent practice with offices in London and Guildford. Alliotts specialise in providing tax advice and business services to growing companies, helping them to achieve their personal and corporate objectives.

Challenges

Alliotts were feeling dispirited with the state of their IT infrastructure and the lack of management to improve it. It did the job, but it wasn’t cutting edge and there were lots of changes to be made. Their previous provider had them on legacy systems, which were old and misconfigured. The Citrix infrastructure wasn’t serving them well and they didn’t feel like their accountancy and IT requirements were properly understood by their provider.
They wanted to get:
  • better value for money with IT,
  • a reliable support service,
  • a system that performed well for all users,
  • an up to date laptop and desktop estate,
  • and modern collaboration tools that would make their workforce more agile and innovative.
They often felt like they were waiting for a crisis to happen, and a user even quoted “we’re not efficient, people are doing work they wouldn’t have to if we used IT better.” Productivity losses were costing the firm and they wanted to make changes to meet their requirements as a growing accountancy practice. It was important to Alliotts to become more resilient, and they were excited about the prospect of moving to a cloud infrastructure that would boost their everyday IT experience.

Solution

T-Tech being an IT company who understands the accountancy sector, CCH and other accountancy applications gave Alliotts peace of mind that we had the foreknowledge to support them. Our extensive experience with a large base of existing customers for every product and who use the same software and systems, meant we understood their business from the start.
Their existing systems made it difficult to improve processes, which is why we suggested they move to the Azure cloud in order to give them that flexibility to improve.
We wanted to provide Alliotts with better tools and ultimately move them away from Citrix to Office 365 and Azure. We implemented a migration plan to this modern infrastructure. This would resolve a lot of longstanding issues for Alliotts, such as performance issues when they needed more capacity, and further push their usage of collaboration tools within Office 365.
To resolve the issues surrounding innovation, T-Tech proposed that all systems would be updated to enable modern working practices, including new laptops for all users, and deployment of Teams as the main collaboration tool across the practice. This allowed Alliotts to fully embrace flexible working and the modern workplace.
T-Tech ensured there was a collective, strategic plan in place from the start of the relationship, with a dedicated representative on the Alliotts side to drive these new ways of working.

Outcome

Adjusting to a new relationship and overcoming the initial challenges caused a few hiccups along the journey. But after 6 months, everything worked really well. Chris Cairns, partner at Alliotts quoted: “Before the pandemic, IT fundamentally changed how we worked. It created a much more modern and seamless working IT environment. Adjusting to lockdown would have been so much harder if we hadn’t invested in IT before. By the time Covid hit, everybody already was fully set up to work remotely, they were ready to go.”
Strategic choices were made before the pandemic hit to scale up the number of Azure servers Alliotts were using, which meant when everyone switched to remote working overnight, it all worked well. The momentary panic that something was going to go wrong quickly disappeared, and users have now realised they actually much prefer the agile and flexible work style.
IT went from being a horrible headache, to being a smooth and easy operation. Alliotts challenged the status quo and they made huge gains because of it.
Azure and Office 365 has massively improved their user productivity and has made collaborating both internally and externally a lot easier. 

Future

Alliotts and T-Tech have plans to future-proof the firm, and Alliotts hope to become even more sophisticated in their use of IT.
There is a good working relationship between Alliotts and T-Tech, and we have built a strong rapport with dedicated team members. Alliotts hope to: explore the possibilities of integrated telephony within Teams, enhance their use of SharePoint, use automation across more processes, and continually adjust security measures to remain resilient.
“Unless your job in the firm is IT then you cannot physically do it. It is so complicated, so fast moving, and quick changing that you can’t keep up. You then have no choice but to use a Managed Service Provider. An MSP needs to be people you respect, who you get on with, as it is a personal relationship. It needs to be with people who understand your business and your business needs – we have this with T-Tech.” Chris Cairns, Partner at Alliotts

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Managing Partner, Grunberg & Co

“Communication is great. When a DR event occurred, the confidence from senior-level engineers and team leaders to resolve the issue was very reassuring. The reaction from T-Tech was great and they had all hands on deck.”

Tax Partner, Grunberg & Co

“We don’t hear any noise from our staff about support tickets not being addressed. The Service Desk engineers are attentive and solve any urgent issues we have in a timely manner.”

Senior Partner, Grunberg & Co

“I really don’t have many issues, and when I do need help, the team are really responsive. You guys are brilliant.”

Senior Account Manager, T-Tech

“We are excited about the future of our relationship with Grunberg & Co. Their enthusiasm toward growing with technology makes our partnership strong and aligned.”

IT Manager, Software Radio Technology

"T-Tech understand our business requirements and provide us with consultancy and strategy input that contribute to customer retention and business growth. Their knowledgeable staff guide us through projects ensuring that technology is aligned to business objectives."

Senior Partner, Solomon Taylor & Shaw

"Like many companies we were unsure about a move to the cloud. But all we have noticed since the move is how much more efficient the business is. There was no disruption during our working hours and we have increased our billable working time due to the decrease in technology downtime."

Senior Partner, Solomon Taylor & Shaw

"Like many companies we were unsure about a move to the cloud. But all we have noticed since the move is how much more efficient the business is. There was no disruption during our working hours and we have increased our billable working time due to the decrease in technology downtime."

Managing Partner, BKL

"We are impressed by the professionalism of T-Tech. They are able to understand our business requirements and provide solutions which contribute to keeping the company efficient and competitive. Their knowledgeable staff guide us through complex projects and all the skills are available to make any system or process transition smooth."

Partner, Raffingers

“We were apprehensive to embark on such a large project to move all our servers to Azure, but we had no issues due to the extensive planning and great support we had from the T-Tech team. We now have the benefit of truly being able to work from any device with no risk to our servers as they are not on site. Our security has now improved, and the systems are a lot more stable which is needed with over 100 users working from all over the world.”

Managing Partner, Family Law Group

“Before T-Tech, we were having issues with IT on a daily basis. In a quick time period, T-Tech turned things around. Within a matter of months, the firm’s IT changed from being a source of daily complaint and frustration to no longer being the first item for discussion at the monthly management meetings. The improvement to the firm’s day to day IT functioning has not only been remarkable, but in fact has enabled the firm to adapt to change at a far quicker pace than had previously been the case.”

Director of Tax Technology, Evelyn Partners

The responsiveness of T-Tech has been paramount to us getting particular components added to Practice Gateway at our firm. What we have needed most in development terms is always listened to.

Managing Partner, Scrutton Bland

“Scrutton Bland has achieved a lot in the last 6 months, compared to the last three years. We chose T-Tech to do a practice review with the intention to deliver on a number of projects, due to their industry expertise and where they sit in the marketplace. Our previous IT team did not have relevant sector experience leading to the consideration of solutions that weren’t relevant to our sector. We needed to look to restore faith in our IT leadership. T-Tech came to us with recommendations and improvements on trusted solutions that have worked for other professional services firms. We are really pleased with the decision to work with T-Tech, and they have already delivered on major projects in a way that suits our practice.”

Partner, Alliotts LLP

“Unless your job in the firm is IT then you cannot physically do it. It is so complicated, so fast moving, and quick changing that you can’t keep up. You then have no choice but to use a Managed Service Provider. An MSP needs to be people you respect, who you get on with, as it is a personal relationship. It needs to be with people who understand your business and your business needs – we have this with T-Tech.”

Director of Support Services, Bletchley Park

"Our interaction with T-Tech goes further than IT support – their consultancy led approach has delivered us gains across the business and revenue to the bottom line. We have a clear 3 year IT plan and strategy, which helps us deliver significant business benefits on a regular basis. T-Tech have helped us improve our IT resilience and helped identify ways for our team to work more efficiently."

IT Manager, Searchlight

“T-Tech have provided a fantastic service and are very efficient.”

IT Partner, Saffery Champness

“We’ve achieved exactly what we wanted to, which was to allow T-Tech to run the IT Service Desk service so that we can focus on the business. It has given us a lot of time back and allowed the staff who moved to T-Tech to have a new lease of life in their careers. A lot of our challenges around recruitment and retention have also gone! It’s good to know we’re in safe hands.”

Team Leader, CCM

"More of our colleagues’ time will be freed up to focus on other critical business needs such as data cleansing and addressing anomalies and exceptions"