The Background
Utility Bidder was established in 2009 by James Longley. James identified the need for a transparent company to bring the best utility tariffs to UK businesses. Utility Bidder offers a fully comprehensive service, working with the top UK utility and energy suppliers to offer customers gas and electricity at competitive prices. The company, which is continuously growing, employs around 130 people across two headquarters in Northamptonshire and Manchester.
The Challenge
Utility Bidder has stayed ahead of the curve by investing in technology, including building a flexible and modern IT infrastructure with a heavy focus on cloud-based solutions and security. Over time, the company’s IT services were spread out across different platforms, both in infrastructure and budgeting, making them difficult to manage. Its Microsoft services, which play a pivotal role in its day-to-day business proceedings, were particularly in need of consolidation.
The Solution
Initially, Utility Bidder began working with Daisy Communications for its business mobile data plans. As a result of the great service and good working relationship, the company began to explore Daisy’s other services. With the advice of Daisy Account Manager, Ben Temple, Utility Bidder discovered the ideal way to not only consolidate its services and make savings.
After a seamless transition, Daisy became Utility Bidder’s managed service provider for Microsoft 365. This was soon followed by a similar migration on its Microsoft Azure service. This posed an interesting challenge due to the infrastructure’s reliance on Azure services, but it was easily overcome by the Daisy team.
During these migrations, support professionals from Daisy and Bytes helped to design a brand-new data team infrastructure, implementing new services such as SQL Managed Instances. They advised on best practices and recommendations for the goals that Utility Bidder should set out to achieve.
The business’ most recent requirement was to implement a Multifactor Authentication solution. After looking into the free services offered with Microsoft Azure, Utility Bidder decided it needed an alternative solution that provided hardware tokens to authenticate. Daisy was able to both recommend a product and work to resolve issues that arose during the implementation process.
The Result
By consolidating services and transferring its Microsoft 365 licence to Daisy Communications, Utility Bidder has been able to better manage its services and make immediate savings.
“We are very happy with our working relationship with Daisy Communications,” said Ross Lauder, IT Support Manager at Utility Bidder. “We have saved money, added resources, and streamlined our IT services. We will continue to build upon this with Daisy in the future!”
Daisy is looking forward to continuing its relationship with Utility Bidder and is ready to provide support with anything it may need in the future.