The IT crowd

The year was 1999, Helen Clarke became our first elected female Prime Minister, the Euro became the common currency of the European Union, Australians voted no to becoming a republic, Prince got us to party (again) like it was… well, 1999 and the world was officially going to end on New Year’s Eve when all the computers ticked over to 00.

Two small digits stood between the human race and digital annihilation. Businesses spent millions, if not billions, of dollars shoring up their IT infrastructure to minimise the fall out from Y2K. Twenty-one years on and it all seems a bit like science fiction, however, what it did highlight was the need for businesses to have a robust, tailored IT framework.

“Stratus was established nine years ago with a mission of providing dedicated IT solutions to the architectural and engineering markets,” says Manager, Jaivin Ramkissoon.

“Not only are we the sole company in New Zealand with this IT specialisation, our Managing Director, Des Pudney, was himself in architecture for 25-plus years, most recently as the CIO for a major architectural and engineering firm, before starting Stratus.

“Many of our customers had poor experiences with more generalist IT providers, simply because they couldn’t offer them the specialist focus and expertise we can. Thanks to this focus, our technical team is best placed to ensure a more efficient troubleshooting approach for architects and engineers—especially when it comes to technical CAD/BIM applications and performance issues for design software such as Revit, ArchiCAD, AutoCAD and more.”

Jaivin says Stratus’ engineers are trained in and understand all of the major architectural and engineering software packages and use the ITIL service delivery framework.

“All of our services centre on best-practice solutions, whether it’s day-to-day support; servers, desktops and devices through to high-availability solutions; cloud solutions; or, back-up and disaster recovery solutions—each is geared towards the client’s individual needs.

“My advice is: ‘don’t wait for your system to fail’. Every customer has our remote monitoring solution as standard; everything else is tailored to their needs. Our team has extensive change management experience to assist with driving IT strategy to ensure no loss of productivity and also around scalability; helping companies with their transition from one environment to another.”

While the Stratus offices are located in Auckland at the Harbourside Business Park in Avondale, Jaivin says, not surprisingly, that all of their clients are supported remotely with onsite intervention only as necessary.

“Remote solutions are what we do, so yes, we remotely connect to and support clients. However, we have established relationships with onsite IT services in Wellington and Christchurch, so once any problems are diagnosed that can only be resolved onsite, we can send support staff to those locations.

“Most of our clients are Auckland-based, generally with multi-site offices around the country or are single-site firms that have satellite home offices, which means resolution of non-remote issues can be carried out with a minimum of disruption to BAU practices.”

Stratus offers 24/7 monitoring of servers, workstations and network devices backed up by a secure, customer helpdesk portal accessed via their website.

Learn more about how dedicated IT services can benefit your architecture or engineering business.