Apparatus Helps Ad Agency Bridge Platforms

Client Profile

Young & Laramore Advertising is a full-service advertising agency based in Indianapolis. The company employs approximately 50 people who produce and manage advertising and marketing communications-related campaigns for regional and national accounts.

Challenge

Aaron Kohn has served as Young & Laramore’s IT director for the past 10 years. Though he oversees all areas of the agency’s IT needs, according to Kohn, his primary focus is providing desktop and phone support for its employees. Like many other “creative industry” businesses, Young & Laramore employees rely on a combination of Macintosh and PCs to do their work.

Though connectivity between the two platforms – and parallel line-of-business software, including email, calendaring and others – had improved, issues still remained. Kohn believed engaging additional IT support and removing local administration and responsibility for those processes would better serve the agency’s clients and employees.

Solution

In late 2009, Kohn met with Apparatus representatives to discuss migrating email and related communications and productivity software to an external server supported and monitored by Apparatus. The process proved to be trouble-free, enough so that Kohn then asked Apparatus to replace an aging application server in order to update and streamline the agency’s infrastructure while creating a more stable and secure platform.

Results

Kohn believed moving email and related software would be relatively straight forward, but was surprised when migrating the agency’s multiple domains to the new server turned out to be equally smooth. “The server migration was a dream,” he says. “It was a big deal for us, and it was nice to have the project work right, and work right out of the box.”

Though he’s happy with the connectivity and support solutions Apparatus provided, Kohn says the company’s services and skill sets are equally important to him. “You get spoiled by Apparatus,” he says. “Besides a salesperson, I have an account manager and a field engineer working with me. But I also have unfettered access to anyone with just a phone call. The technology skills at Apparatus are there, but to have so many sound minds available is really nice. If there is a problem, I have no fear they’re going to be able to fix anything I throw at them. And that takes a tremendous amount of stress out of my life.”