The Digital Marketplace Contenders, 4: Cased Dimensions, Belfast

In the next in our series looking at small, promising new entrants to the UK public sector tech supply chain, we meet Stewart Wapshare, UK Sales Director of Cased Dimensions

Hi Stewart, can you tell us about your company and its value proposition, please?

With pleasure. Cased Dimensions has extensive experience in the design, development, integration and support of Microsoft System Center and hybrid cloud solutions and services. Our consultants have worked with customers in the Local Government, Health, Defence, Financial Services, Industrial and Utilities sectors to deliver tangible business benefits including increased productivity, reduced capital expenditure, increased efficiency and reduced total cost of ownership. Our shared services center in Belfast, here in Northern Ireland, is fully compliant with ITIL 3.0, is CESG approved and provides a range of diverse managed and support services to our customers. As a Microsoft System Center Alliance Partner and an Azure Cloud Service Provider, Cased Dimensions is considered a leader in its field.

The Cased Dimensions service offering is tailored to provide customers with solutions that will fully support their journey into the cloud. They include:

• Office 365 Migration – Assisting customers with a smooth migration of their Exchange environments into the cloud
• Azure Hybrid Services – Working with customers to determine which on-premises services can be relocated in Azure
• Azure Consulting Services – Advising customers on the most appropriate approach to adopting Azure
• Azure Cloud Services Provider – Cased Dimensions offers customers a tier 1 service desk that eases in-life adoption of Azure services
• OMS – Advising customers on the deployment and use of Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite to facilitate the management of their on-premises and Azure infrastructure.

Great, very helpful, thanks. So why are you going on The Digital Marketplace? What do you expect to get out of it? Why now?

I recently joined Cased Dimensions to lead the sales team and transform the operation and become more business relevant: part of this new strategy was to refocus our sales efforts and customer interaction. We are a Microsoft Alliance Partner, and I have spent the last couple of months re-building our brand within Microsoft and understanding how we can develop joint propositions to support Microsoft’s strategy of driving Azure adoption.

Part of this campaign was review our go to market and sector focus. We have a number of Public Sector and Healthcare customers and I wanted to expand this focus area so we started to look at what was the best way of approaching this and getting better traction within this sector. We spent some time reviewing the market and listening to how the Government wanted to change its focus and procurement process, and part of this was an initiative was a preference to work with smaller businesses.

As a small business, the investment in both time and personnel to respond to a public sector bid is usually quite time consuming and has a large cost of sale. Still, we researched The Digital Marketplace and G-Cloud and learned that this framework was a sales and marketing process for selling into government departments who potentially have a preference to buy from the smaller businesses. Having decided we would embrace G-cloud, we then partnered with a specialist company to understand how to best approach the submission. As a result, our expectation is to extend our reach and relevance into the Public and Healthcare Sector.

Great, but how did you find the process of applying?

The actual process was relatively easy, but very time consuming as there was a lot of information required to support the different lots we were interested in applying for. So we approached this in the same way we would respond to an ITT' we reviewed the questions and divided our efforts and responses into the different sections.

Like I said, we had support from a specialist in all this called Advice Cloud who were our partner to help navigate the journey to G Cloud! I think without their help and guidance, we would have struggled, as the process is very time consuming and they were able to help expedite the process.

Glad to hear it! So any other statements about what you see as the future for cloud as a delivery mechanism for UK public services?

Technology has always played a vital role in the way local government manages its business. As councils face the challenges of decreasing funding and increasing demand, they have found new ways of utilising technology to deliver services more effectively and enable their staff work in new ways, increasing productivity and reducing costs.

By 2015, central government funding for councils will have been cut by 40% over the period. The key is a continued growing adoption of the 'cloud first' policy and by utilising the services of smaller businesses that help accelerate this adoption and business benefit.

To find out more about this G-Cloud-7 Digital Contender, go here

We are looking for other companies entering the Digital Marketplace and would love to feature your experiences in this new on-going editorial series. Please get in touch with us here to kick start process: gary.flood@24n.biz

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