The Emigration Group

Crisis averted after ISP goes bust

It's hard now to imagine a time before email and the internet. The unexpected loss of these essential business services can prove a disaster, creating missed orders and administrative nightmares. One December morning just such a crisis fell on The Emigration Group.

The Chester-based migration consultants prepare and manage residence visa applications and the finding of employment in Australia and New Zealand. Access to the web and the use of email every day is imperative for the smooth running of their business and it's easy to imagine MD Paul Arthur's dismay when he arrived at the office to find it was impossible to log on.

"I got straight on to Samarind, whom we had been using for IT support for several years," Paul said. "They carried out some research and discovered, to our horror, that our Internet Services Provider had gone out of business the night before. We'd been left completely in the lurch. It was an appalling situation.

"The irony is that we'd never been entirely happy with our ISP. They had been recommended to us by another IT firm we'd used many years before. Samarind had recommended we change to a more reliable ISP but I had been concerned about disruption to the business!"

Senior Engineer Guy Salmon was immediately dispatched to The Emigration Group to try and find a solution. Guy came up with the novel idea of accessing email through the offices of a company in the same building.

"Our neighbours kindly agreed to let us use their connections, and soon Guy had wires running here there and everywhere," Paul recalls. "By a miracle, as it seemed to me, we got our email back.

"While this was going on, Samarind negotiated with another ISP and BT to get us a new service in record time - 36 hours rather than the many days it would otherwise have taken. The team at Samarind worked extremely hard, above and beyond the call of duty."

Paul says he is "much happier" with the new ISP recommended by Samarind and he's finding everything now runs much more smoothly. Fail-safes have been installed to make sure such a situation can't happen again.

"We've always found Samarind exceptional in terms of their knowledge, professionalism and levels of support," said Paul. "I don't make recommendations lightly, but I have been happy to recommend Samarind to other companies on several occasions."