The Client
IRIS Software Group helps over 80,000 businesses, schools and public sector organisations to successfully manage their critical operational tasks. The group offers software solutions for accountancy, payroll, and Human Resources Management (HRM), to organisations of all size, across the United Kingdom.
IRIS is the largest privately owned software company in the UK with over 8 million users, 21,000 small to medium enterprises using IRIS cloud-based book-keeping and a greater than 40% share of the HRM market. The software is often portrayed as the invisible but essential beating heart of customers’ businesses, supporting them in a range of objectives, from maintaining legislative compliance to boosting engagement with stakeholders, to enhancing productivity. It’s vital these mission-critical functions work first time, every time.
The Challenge
IRIS Financials (formerly PS Financials) is an industry-leading unified accountancy system that has seen enormous success in the education and charitable sectors. The integrated financial management software empowers the staff of Multi-Academy Trusts and other schools to take greater control of their finances. Powerful reporting, automation, and ease of use help save time and reduce the risk of error.
The challenge is to provide a multi-location; multi-entity and multi-currency accounting service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week playing an intrinsic role in the running of UK-based education. However, for most clients in the educational and charitable sectors, the requirements and complexities of running technology and data storage ‘on-premise’ is not deemed to be a “core competency”. Scarce resources can be better targeted elsewhere.
Many IRIS Financials customers want their accountancy and human resources management software to be provided as a ‘total service’; moving to a model which takes the burden of cost and management away from their internal teams. To make this possible, IRIS Financials needs to be hosted by BlackBox Hosting and delivered ‘as a service’ for IRIS customers. Such a model ensures comprehensive security, state-of-the-art backup and recovery capabilities and complete 24 by 7 availability. IRIS Financial customers gain a simple and predictable cost model, paying an agreed monthly fee, eliminating the concern of unexpected IT costs.
The Solution… powered by BlackBox
IRIS has partnered with BlackBox Hosting to offer a full end-to-end cloud service; from initial consultation and planning to deployment and on-going support of the IT platform. Powered by BlackBox Hosting, but provided to clients as a remotely hosted service, the solution offers a seamless, scalable, and quality IT infrastructure to their customers who rely on optimised performance. It is backed-up, resilient and secure, with guaranteed availability.
No matter how complex the cloud and software hosting requirements might be, the data centre experts at BlackBox Hosting can deliver mission-critical software as a managed service from its state-of-the-art, secure, Tier-3 data centres, catering to all sizes of organisation.
Why BlackBox?
In short, BlackBox Hosting is responsive to the needs of IRIS Software Group and their clients, providing a service that is tailored and flexible but also competitively priced. Their software becomes the beating heart of a client’s operation and thus requires that they need a hosting company to provide market-leading hosting services with super-fast connections and state-of-the-art backbone technology. The fundamentals of a secure, reliable and available service must also be guaranteed.
Of course, a reliable hosting technology foundation is just one part of a company’s strategic decision.
Our goal at BlackBox Hosting is to build long-term relationships with our partners, founded upon two fundamental principles:
- We want to work with organisations that have a similar ethos and attitude, demanding professional excellence in everything they do.
- We want to make the commercial proposition work for all parties, which for IRIS Financials means delivering for its clients with the best service at the best possible price.
At BlackBox Hosting, we recognise that long-term relationships will evolve, grow and change over time. With this in mind, we challenge ourselves daily to work closely with our partners in order to adapt rapidly and continuously improve.
