Hampden Group & Seymour Taylor

Hampden Group acquired Seymour Taylor (ST) in July 2009. Seymour Taylor is a six partner practice firm of chartered accountants based in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. To maximise the investment in their recent acquisition, Hampden Group was keen to merge ST’s IT infrastructure into the Hampden network. As experts in IT restructuring brought about by mergers and acquisitions, Frontier was enlisted to provide the solutions.

Hampden’s main objective was to have one seamless network between themselves and ST. They required centralised user management, a unified email system and wanted to decommission ST’s legacy Servers. ST had 35 users with 35 PC’s and three servers; however at the time of the acquisition there were limited IT resources with only one member in the team.

Based on previous experience, Hampden Group decided to enlist the help of Frontier to advise and install the solutions “We had already had the Frontier experience” commented Andrew Hough, IT Manager at Hampden Group “Everything was done exceptionally well and on time and to budget. With limited resources available at the time of the acquisition, Frontier seemed like the obvious choice.”

Initially our consultants conducted a full needs analysis, considering the IT infrastructure of the two firms and their current and future requirements. After producing a detailed implementation plan, we went on to install the solutions.

Combining the IT Infrastructure

Our consultants ensured that the two firms’ active directory and email was rapidly integrated. We firstly conducted an active directory migration, all of ST user accounts, groups, servers and PC’s were moved to the existing hampden.co.uk domain. To ensure there was no disruption to business, prior to the migration, a group of five pilot users were selected and a successful test run was performed. Enterprise Vault was used to unify the firms’ email. We chose Enterprise Vault because it is the industry leading email archiving solution, it migrates data in accordance with IT policies while improving performance, reducing costs and simplifying management. Microsoft Hyper-V was utilised to virtualise and consolidate the servers. The solution provided a cost effective and scalable system which met Hampden Group’s business requirements. The new virtualised servers have increased operational and management efficiency and have reduced hardware and maintenance costs.

A seamless integration

Our solutions ensured that the Hampden Group and ST’s infrastructure was rapidly integrated with minimum disruption to business. All users in both companies were able to continue with their normal working activities during the IT consolidation and we completely removed the need for the Hampden Group’s IT team to be involved.

“Everything was integrated seamlessly” said Hough “Frontier’s solutions meant that we could easily work from both locations and arrange meetings with ST. The whole project was delivered quickly and effectively, there were no issues at all.”

Frontier Technology has an excellent relationship with Hampden Group; we have been working together for the past four years on a number of projects “We enjoy and continue working with Frontier because they think on their feet. When it comes to reality it is important to be pragmatic.” concluded Hough.