Easterseals of Southeastern Pennsylvania
For nearly 100 years, Easterseals of Southeastern Pennsylvania has been helping people with disabilities gain greater independence. Their mission is to provide exceptional services to ensure that all people with disabilities or special needs and their families have equal opportunities to live, learn, work and play in their communities.
Their services include Approved Private School, special classrooms, summer programs, recreational programs, parent-infant programs, Assistive technology, early intervention programs and various outpatient speech, physical and occupational therapy programs. Children who receive these services are challenged with a variety of disabilities, including autism, cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, spina bifida and physical and developmental delays.
Challenge
Easterseals was running on an aging and insufficient technology platform but more than that, they did not have a technology plan that took into consideration the needs of their business. With six locations, covering each of the five major counties (Philadelphia, Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware) and more than 300 employees, Easterseals of Southeastern Pennsylvania needed their technology infrastructure to be consistent, reliable and support the business process and work of the staff. Fundamentally, they were looking to improve corporate compliance, data archiving, disaster recovery and capitalize on cloud technology.
Approach
ITDATA began our relationship with Easterseals of Southeastern Pennsylvania in July of 2010 with a 12 week comprehensive technology assessment and strategy study. Our team analyzed, evaluated, and made recommendations for all aspects of their technology environment: Network Infrastructure; Servers; Applications and licensing; Workstations, laptops and mobile connectivity. Each of these areas was evaluated from an operational, financial and strategic perspective.
The assessment laid out a path forward for Easterseals of Southeastern Pennsylvania to realize more value from their technology.
Results
The first step in their value proposition was to undertake a complete refresh and upgrade of their network infrastructure, servers, and application software. We successfully completed a 12 week upgrade project which migrated Easterseals from older outdated versions of Novell Netware, Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Office 2003 to current releases of Microsoft Server 2008R2, Microsoft Exchange 2010, and Microsoft Office 2010. Their entire email system was migrated from an aging GroupWise to a Microsoft Exchange platform, which is now hosted in ITDATA’s tier 3 datacenter.
Next, we restructured the delivery of their IT Help Desk Services, which provides support for all five locations. Our expert help desk restructuring provided a 50% reduction in help desk requests and support costs. Thorough computer systems training provided organization-wide efficiencies for the Easterseals’ staff and further helped to reduce overall help desk ticket requests.
Lastly, ITDATA successfully upgraded the wide area network (WAN) connectivity to provide greater bandwidth and adding failover/redundancy. Easterseals of Southeastern Pennsylvania now leverages ITDATA’s private, redundant, VMware based Cloud, and backup and disaster recovery services to better deliver their data and protect their information.
ITDATA continues to deliver a secure technology infrastructure and processes to support new technology initiatives, so that Easterseals can better serve donors and beneficiaries.
Strategic Planning. Reliable Execution. Predictable Results.
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