A leading government support agency needed a scalable platform that would allow their business to effectively and efficiently grow.

Manawanui is the leading facilitator of Self-Direction in New Zealand, putting disabled customers in control of how they receive support at home and in the community.

The organisation enables people to live with greater independence by helping them purchase the support they need, employ the people they want and manage their budget.

Manawanui is the industry leader in this space and has international expansion plans. But in order to grow, the organisation decided to consolidate its IT support into a single provider and to start leveraging the Microsoft Cloud.

Increased security and scalability were key drivers when it went to the market for a solution.

​Intellium Technology now provides a single point of contact for all of its technology needs by taking advantage of Intellium’s range of services including a 24/7 IT helpdesk, Managed Internet, failover connection, cloud hosting and security.

"For an organisation like ours, technology is key. It’s important to our brand and business and so the ability to work effectively with an IT support provider and have that reliability and capability that you can access is strategically significant."

"Intellium ticked all those boxes and that’s been borne out. They’ve moved everything to the cloud quickly and without many issues. Now we’re in the process of maturing that design and taking it to the next level."

Intellium’s expertise lies in its ability to help organisations transform infrastructure to enable their business growth.

Phase one of the project was to transpose Manawanui’s existing server infrastructure environment into the Microsoft Azure Cloud. The second phase being, improving the design and further strengthening security, as well as making it more scalable. Intellium has provided Manawanui with a more scalable and secure platform that will better support its growth moving forward.

"We continue to grow as a business and that’s an important part of it: using technology to allow us to scale effectively and efficiently."

"We now have the ability to evolve and scale rapidly should we need to."

"We are looking at other markets where we can take our business model further and we are in a good position now having invested in our infrastructure, applications and systems."

The team can scale their applications, servers and resources when demand is required.

Mark Taylor, Intellium’s Director of Business Development, says "Our driver was ‘How do we make their job easier?, by taking the load off them to enable more productivity and to focus on the really exciting and challenging job of growing their business".

Manawanui agrees that having Intellium providing IT supports allows Manawanui to focus on building new software and delivering more functionality for its customers.

"The solution we have built is specifically focused on our customers and their needs. It’s accessible for anyone on any device and we’ve invested a lot to make it as quick and easy as possible."

A significant part of the business is payroll as Manawanui has more than 4000 customers from across New Zealand and together those customers have many thousands of employees.

"We’ve gone from an IT environment that was fragmented to one that is mature."

"The security that can be delivered in Azure cloud and the capability of the cloud gives us a lot of options."

"The time that it takes to evolve within the cloud is measured in days instead of what has historically been weeks or months."

A strong partnership

Overall, Manawanui says Intellium have been excellent to work with.

"They work with all our vendors really well and have been responsive and open. They have also shown they are a values-based organisation, which is really important to us."

Mark says: "Manawanui is a really amazing New Zealand business doing inspiring work in the community and we are delighted to be supporting their endeavours and helping them to grow."