IT services company, blueAPACHE, has announced that it has signed a managed services contract with Berry Street, one of Australia’s largest and most respected independent family service organisations.

blueAPACHE will be responsible for consolidating and providing a scalable and flexible IT infrastructure to support Berry Street’s current work. It will also future proof the organisation, enabling Berry Street to pivot to new opportunities for ongoing services growth in the community.

As an independent family service organisations, Berry Street provides a diverse range of programs to over 40,000 children, young people and families in Victoria each year. Services include foster care, therapeutic programs, family violence and support services, and the Berry Street School.

The decision to select blueAPACHE followed a comprehensive market review to find an IT managed services partner who could be trusted to locally support Berry Street’s 1,400 strong workforce, many of whom work remotely across Victoria and away from the organisation’s head office in Melbourne.

At the same time, it needed a solution to provide a suite of IT services for its clients in residential facilities, including high bandwidth connectivity for access to learning and entertainment applications.

As Neelu Kaur, Head of IT, Berry Street, explains, “We wanted to work with an organisation which was highly regarded in the not-for-profit space, held accountability in high regard and could help us transform and modernise our IT environment. All this while ensuring continuity of service with the agility to rapidly support change when required.”

They shortlisted four companies and selected blueAPACHE based on its robust experience in the not-for-profit sector and its capacity as an Australian privately-owned company to understand challenges and support locally for the long term.

“It was also able to provide a unique range of solutions through the blueAPACHE emPOWER managed services catalogue. This will enable us to access a suite of services to connect applications, data and devices as well as boost our security thereby providing a long-term technology solution for our end user community,” Kaur said.

In addition, Berry Street also sought a vendor who could provide an IT environment sufficiently flexible for a remote workforce and also enable it to rapidly scale up support as and when community support requirements arise.

“We had a brilliant onboarding experience of blueAPACHE’s emPOWER Managed Services, which coincided with the start of the COVID-19 lockdown,” says Kaur. “In addition to the managed services contract, blueAPACHE worked with us to provide 4G data connectivity and devices to 24 sites. This is enabling young people to enjoy high speed Internet connectivity during COVID-19 for an immersive learning and entertainment experience. The Connectivity in a Box as a service solution created by blueAPACHE was ideal for Berry Street erasing the overhead expense of buying new devices and data while providing for rapid deployment at the organisation’s moment of need.”

This positive experience has now lead Berry Street to engage further with blueAPACHE around a full IT transformation.

Chris Marshall, Founder and Managing Director, blueAPACHE, says, “We’re now putting in place a technology transformation roadmap taking legacy information to the cloud providing disaster recovery as a service, updating their security posture and migrating apps to a hosted private cloud. Our total focus is on delivering the outcomes. These outcomes aren’t just measured in IT terms but also in terms of improved safety of vulnerable children and their families.”

Kaur added, “During the last few months, we have built a partnership based on trust and successful delivery of innovative solutions. blueAPACHE has more than delivered on what they promised and as a result we now see them as a managed services partner who we’re looking to engage for guidance on our overall IT transformation. We’re excited about the future possibilities that working with blueAPACHE will achieve for our community.”