SherWeb’s Cloud Servers Push Efficiency “Through the Roof”

Tundra Improves Efficiency by 30% after Hosting QuickBooks in the Cloud

Xander Robar knows a thing or two about efficiency. When this Managed Service Provider was looking for a solution to a client’s payroll problem, he turned to SherWeb and its Performance Cloud servers.

Tundra is a Toronto-based recruiting firm that hires employees for technology and engineering companies around the world. Since opening its doors in 2004, Tundra has grown from 3 to 170 employees and now operates offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

The company was looking for an easy way for its two accounting teams to process weekly payroll for up to 5,000 employees. Their problem?

Their 20-member accounting team was working out of two separate offices in Toronto and Manila and had no way to consolidate file sharing. Each team was updating wp-content separately and saving them in Dropbox. Robar said it was a laborious process that was eating up an extra 10 hours a week.

“It was hard for people to collaborate if they couldn’t see their accounting data,” said Robar, president of OnSwitch. “If the accounting can’t be working, nothing else is running. Backing up a database every day for almost two hours. For a 24-hour shop, this is just ridiculous.”

Keep Data in Canada

Robar said he was searching for a datacenter for Tundra but he needed a solution that would allow the company to keep its data in Canada and have fast access to technical support. Tundra had considered using the QuickBooks Enterprise Edition, but found that Intuit, the software provider for QuickBooks, had specific restrictions about which applications could be installed on its servers. Robar said Tundra currently uses five applications that integrate with QuickBooks but Intuit allowed only one of them to be used. Robar convinced Tundra that hosting QuickBooks on Performance Cloud would protect its data and allow the company to be more productive.

“We need the bullet-proof cloud and we need good service and that’s what we got with SherWeb,” he said.

Tundra used three virtual machines from Performance Cloud for data in Canada, the US and the UK. The result? The company improved efficiency by 25-30%. The accounting teams also gained about 10 hours a week in productivity.

“The efficiency is going through the roof! Now with everyone on the same server with RDS (Remote Desktop Services), everyone is looking at the data at the same time. Backups are automatic and they don’t have to share wp-content. They can import and export as much data as they want and if they need approval, they can just flag it in the system. They don’t have to send emails.”

Not an Easy Sell

Despite the success, Robar said the client wasn’t an easy sell. Tundra had always controlled its own data and wasn’t ready to send it to someone else. They also had a couple of unfortunate experiences with various IT providers and were a bit leery of the cloud. Robar contacted SherWeb for more information, and with case studies and partner references in hand, he was able to convince Tundra to make the move.

“I said to them, ‘If we put you in the SherWeb cloud, I have more confidence your data will be protected in a locked datacentre. This (data) is the lifeblood of your business. You need to protect it. It won’t be protected on-premises… ever.“

Data migration was another issue. Robar said because the accountants work 24/7 to accommodate different time zones, there was a very small window of opportunity to migrate the data. During the migration, he ran into a problem with the static IP address. However, he was able to get the problem resolved quickly, even if he had to get a technician out of bed at 4 a.m.

“Our maintenance window wasn’t very long and I knew we wouldn’t get another one for the rest of the week. I called SherWeb and it was no more than 15 minutes before the guy was on the line. He solved the problem in half an hour. We’ve had zero issues since then. That’s definitely the level of support I want from a cloud provider.”

Robar said the positive experience with SherWeb’s hosting solutions has changed the way Tundra views the cloud. The company’s executives have gone from mistrusting the cloud altogether to having real faith in how it can help their business be more efficient.

“They’re asking me all these kinds of technical questions now. That’s fantastic! That’s where I want it to go. It’s SherWeb’s rock-solid reliability that’s taken their faith in the cloud and solidified it.”