Innocent Drinks, the makers of 100% fresh fruit
smoothies was established in 1999 as a small stall selling its
smoothie recipes at a music festival. Today, stockists range from
large supermarkets to small health stores throughout the
UK.
The company has doubled in size over the past 18 month and now
employs 83 people. Many of the employees are based at the 'Fruit
Towers' headquarters in Shepherds Bush, London and has offices in
Manchester, Dublin, Amsterdam and Paris.
As with any growing business, Innocent required a scalable and
robust communications and messaging system that could develop and
adapt as the company expanded internationally. The organisation
also required a system which would give remote offices a seamless
connection to state of the art communication tools.
However, as it grew, Innocent was constantly experiencing
problems with its in-house Exchange
server referred to as 'Kiwi'. At Innocent, the servers are all
named after fruit: the primary domain control id called Kiwi;
Backup Domain control, Lemon; Terminal server, Cherry; Financial
server, Plum; Sequel servers, Pear and Peach; Development server,
Carrot.
With Kiwi, the company was close to the 16 Gbyte database limit
that Microsoft had imposed on the Small Business Server with
Exchange. This meant that employees were frequently disconnected
from the server if their email boxes reached capacity. Users were
taken offline whilst the server was rebooted, resulting in periods
of up to four hours downtime. With escalating data requirements,
'Kiwi' could no longer cope and the system was becoming
inefficient, preventing people from performing their roles.
Innocent required a communications and messaging email solution
that could support its unique marketing activity. The company
encourages consumers to contact them via advertised email
addresses, the details of which can be found on the bottom of the
drink bottles. For example,
iambored@innocentdrinks.co.uk.
Over time this strategy has contributed to the increase in mail
volumes, data storage requirements and the number of Public Folders
required to support the growth. One Public Folder alone had 150
different SMTP email addresses and housed 10's of thousands of
emails.
Innocent also experienced high volumes of viruses and spam.
Andrea Kalavsky, Systems Magician (what Innocent calls IT Systems
Manager), would spend valuable time scanning and blocking up to 20
spam messages per mailbox daily.
The company faced a dilemma of how to resolve its communication
needs. It could either purchase more hardware and employ
additional IT staff to support its growing IT requirements, or it
could select a fully managed outsourced service.
To solve its problems, Innocent opted for a Microsoft Hosted
Exchange Service from Cobweb Solutions. This involved handing the
24*7 management of its email, including spam & virus
protection, archiving, backup and remote access capabilities to
Cobweb Solutions. The service is based on a predictable
pay-per-user pricing scheme, so there is no hidden expenditure.
Comments Andrea Kalavsky: "Now that Cobweb Solutions is
managing our communications and messaging, we no longer have to
worry about email downtime. Nor do we have to address the threats
from viruses and spam as Cobweb has it all under control. In
addition to this, we now have fully managed Blackberry services.
This means that we can communicate efficiently with our employees,
suppliers and customers. We are thrilled with this service and
particularly impressed by the fact that the roll out to Blackberry
services did not require the use of desktop software. It was as
easy as simple activation and the entire outlook is now in our
pockets. Our plan is to expand our original capacity of 70 users
to 120 by the end of 2006."
Online collaboration is another business requirement which the
new solution helped to address. As it expanded abroad, Innocent’s
overseas operations departments need to share documents with the UK
teams. One of the options is to implement Cobweb's Hosted Windows
SharePoint Services solution, which will enable the disparate user
base to have access to real-time business information, without
having to solely rely on email.
By outsourcing messaging and collaboration needs, Innocent now
has a reliable communication solution in place, offering the
Innocent team access to email, diary, address books and business
documents anytime, anywhere. This should leave a pleasant taste in
the mouth.