Non-profit organization for college students

About the Client

Based out of Los Angeles, California, a nonprofit organization builds collegiate paths for students raised in under-funded communities. The company offers resources to lower-income students so they can apply and get into college. By partnering with local schools, the organization creates unique programs with tools to overcome educational barriers and to graduate successfully. The organization has a powerful vision of empowering these students, regardless of their circumstances, to obtain a higher education so they can become strong leaders in their communities.

Pain Points

The organization was frustrated with several IT challenges. First, the employees were working with old desktops and laptops, which affected how they accessed their business applications. Second, the IT manager struggled to manage routine but tedious IT tasks, including resolving internal support tickets from remote employees, troubleshooting application issues, and maintaining license updates. The company wanted to adopt a solution quickly so they could properly create programs for their students looking to start college in the upcoming school year. Also, the organization needed a solution that would easily integrate with Blackbaud, a software application that supported their business operations. Lastly, the firm needed to minimize its CapEx budget and adopt a cost-effective solution for the long term.

Solution

RapidScale presented the company with Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution that helped them manage their line-of-business applications more efficiently. This solution simplified application management with automatic patching and updating, which reduced the amount of time spent on routine maintenance. Employees received seamless access to their virtual desktops from any device, increasing mobility and productivity in their workplace. With CloudDesktop, the company reduced its capital spending because management, compute, licensing, and upgrades were combined into a simple monthly cost.

In addition, RapidScale’s fully managed services helped the company manage its end-user device troubleshooting, application integrations, and testing. The organization received a dedicated solutions engineer and project manager to help with implementation and deployment. RapidScale’s RapidResponse team also provided end-user device monitoring and 24/7/365 white-glove support, which delivered an exceptional IT experience to the organization.

Why They Chose RapidScale

The company chose RapidScale because of the team’s ability to cater to the needs of not only the IT manager but also the executive leadership of the company. Another cloud services provider that proposed a solution did not spend nearly as much time understanding the needs of the organization and failed to show the cost benefits of adopting a cloud virtual desktop solution. RapidScale even provided the company with a login to a proof-of-concept environment so they could test the solution for themselves. Spending enough time evaluating the technical requirements and making sure the solution fits their business needs were extremely important factors for the organization.

Another reason why the organization chose RapidScale was because of the team’s ability to virtualize and administer their Blackbaud application. The competing cloud services provider couldn’t demonstrate this integration in their environment, which influenced the company’s decision to adopt RapidScale’s DaaS solution.

Lastly, RapidScale’s fully managed services were significant factors in the company’s decision to choose RapidScale. The organization was impressed by RapidScale’s industry-leading net promoter score and RapidResponse SLA times. The level of management that came with the DaaS solution proved to be superior to the competitor’s managed cloud solution. The fully managed services not only enabled the company to offload mundane IT tasks to RapidScale, but also provided availability, redundancy, and monitoring, which delivered peace of mind to the company.