I recently had the opportunity to speak with Stephen Bakerman, Director of Information Technology, Owen Bird Law Corporation, a Virtual Iron customer. He spent a few moments sharing his experiences with their software. Stephen's comments follow.
Owen Bird Law Corporation is a top level Vancouver law firm with leading professionals in a wide range of commercial and civil litigation practice areas. Owen Bird is British Columbia's only member of Interlaw, a National and International network of distinguished law firms.
The company has between 15 and 17 servers. They are using 40 different applications ranging from commercial off the shelf applications to custom applications. Their organizational structure is different than many other legal firms. Each of the partners has the ability to do business in ways that make the most sense in their area of specialty. This means that the IT organization finds itself supporting a number of client devices, wireless carriers as well as applications that support their business.
Stephen is a one man shop and needed a way to deal with a multi-server, multi-application environment in a simple, easy way. This lead him to explore virtualization technology and management technology for virtualized systems and applications.
Later, the organization started realizing other benefits including lower costs of power, air conditioning, as well as a reduction in storage needed to support the environment. The virtualized environment makes it far easier to deploy thin client systems as well. It also makes it far easier to deal with failure scenarios quickly.
One of the things that Stephen likes about Virtual Iron is that they do business differently. They really are trying to make sure that their customers can gain benefit from the use of the technology they have developed rather than just trying to sell something.
Furthermore, Virtual Iron's management suite makes it easy to deal with a very complex environment without also requiring the IT administrator to learn many new tools. It was easy to get the environment up and running with no hand-holding or headaches.