RedBull Powder’s commercial manager Alex Robins says the company did have an IT service desk provider assisting staff members as required, but the infrastructure and systems behind the scenes needed attention to support the business strategy.
“As a business we have a strong focus on our customers and our approach to health and safety, but we had under-invested in technology which was starting to make life challenging,” Alex explains.
An external assessment of the company’s IT equipment and services was completed in late 2021 and identified key areas requiring attention including ageing servers and infrastructure. Planning to address those areas started in 2022 and was clearly laid out in RedBull’s 2023 business plan. Getting good advice and support was critical for RedBull.
“A business of our size and ambition leans heavily on our vendors to get us to best in class, and our current IT vendor just wasn’t delivering in this area.”
Alex is the first to admit addressing RedBull’s digital challenges needed expertise that simply wasn’t available within the business.
“RedBull was stepping into a significant digital transformation, and I felt we needed to find someone that I could trust, who could provide the right advice and could understand what we needed to help us on our journey.”
DELIVERY
“We created and hired for a new role to take ownership of our digital space and then we needed to find a new vendor who understood how we worked, our scale and how we wanted to make improvements,” Alex says.
“By chance we came across BTG and quickly realised after talking to the directors that they understood our needs and how they could be addressed.”
The RedBull Powder team didn’t just hand the job to BTG, instead putting the company through its paces first.
“We did a like-for-like comparison between the incumbent and BTG. Ultimately, BTG simply got what was most important to us and could see where we needed to improve, like with security and improved network performance.”
Alex explains the BTG team had strong business empathy which was highly valued by RedBull.
“They won because they understood our business, knew we had to be careful with what we spent and knew the value of that.”
A wide-area network (WAN) connection to connect RedBull’s three sites was completed, replacing VPN. This improved the network and created better options for cloud-hosting.
Migrating business applications from aging servers to private cloud was also needed before helping to provide a new ERP system.
Alex says these changes are just the first of a digital transformation journey over the next few years, part of which is building confidence across the business in the digital space with support from BTG.
“With BTG we’ll work on a transformation plan and improve digital knowledge across the business so the team better understands. We’re also looking to move most of our business data to a Sharepoint environment, which will be made easier now we’re in the cloud.”
BTG senior account manager Brent Wall says RedBull is a growing company and needed a solution that would expand with it.
“This includes cloud hosting, management of services and all the licensing. Our job is to be a responsive and proactive IT partner who is always available and ready with advice.”
