Brian Armstrong, Director of Business Coaching and Mentoring group, AltusQ, has had a long and happy association with Gavin Dixon and Cassini Cloud. Prior to engaging them to host the AltusQ accounting system, their Microsoft 365 platform and  Dynamics CRM, and now their wordpress web site, Cassini Cloud had supported Brian in a previous business, Essentially Coffee: “I’d worked with Gavin a long time. We were one of his first clients, with  a business that distributed automated coffee machines and product…. When we started that business, Gavin was just starting Cassini Cloud. He’s always given us good service.”

Brian moved AltusQ’s IT hosting to Cassini Cloud 2.5 years ago because the price point was right. As business coaches, a rigorous attention to their own bottom-line is paramount, but this was not the only criteria that prompted the shift.  The smooth running of IT systems that support the smooth running of a business made up of individuals spread across a large geographical area was higher priority. “It’s not just about providing the service and the platform: a lot of people can do that. It’s more about understanding the business issue and working together to solve that. “

AltusQ have benefitted from the holistic view Gavin and Cassini Cloud have over their business. This has come of long association as well as technical rigour.: “There’s [an] understanding of what is important and what isn’t important. Not everything is to die for. Sometimes it’s a matter of, “Well, it can wait”. But
[Cassini Cloud] have an understanding around critical things in the business and the important things get actioned very quickly. “

For Brian, the most important reason AltusQ trust their IT matters to Cassini Cloud is the level of service they deliver:  “Gavin has always gone beyond. He  doesn’t just do what he’s paid to do under the service agreement. If there’s other things that we need, that he can help with, he’s always been more than willing to do that. It’s a bit unusual for an IT service provider to go outside the scope of the normal contracted arrangement and Gavin does that quite regularly for us.”

When AltusQ moved their wordpress site hosting to Cassini Cloud recently, Gavin was happy to assist with a tricky and potentially expensive integration between their onsite event registration and their CRM. Critical information needs to travel from site to a business’ database in order to manage customer relations and simple attendance figures, but building that funnel to deliver a seamless experience for the user and useful information for business is difficult. Faced with returning to developers who had set up a rigid integration system for AltusQ in the past, Gavin asked his own developers to build an ‘elegant’ solution: “There was work done previously, but that didn’t really work effectively. [It was] over-engineered,   which meant that every time we wanted to do something, we had to go back to the developers and that wasn’t fun for anybody.”

The CRM integration was causing a traffic block to the site build and Gavin and his team stepped in. “[This is] an example of the extra I’ve talked about – Gavin could have said, oh well, we’ll just link with what you’ve got and keep going, but now it’s been architected more elegantly and it’s more flexible going forward.”

“The service aspect  definitely is there. It’s one of the main reasons why we’ve worked with them in the past and will continue to do so in the future”.