The Challenge
Estes has been in the central heating and air business since 1949 and is Atlanta’s Trusted Heating & Air Conditioning Contractor. The company has tripled in size since 2005, now offering plumbing, electrical and weatherization services to their customers. Estes has been featured in many nationally recognized trade publications.
They have won many awards over the years, such as the coveted “Residential Excellence Award” given to the top contractor in America by the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) and the “Best Contractor to Work For in the Southeast Award” given by the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration News magazine.
Estes approached Dito in 2016 looking to replace their existing on-premise infrastructure because of down-time issues. Estes Services business model, by nature, requires them to depend on their resources out in the field actually servicing central heating and air for the Atlanta area.
In 2010, Estes invested in two on-premises servers and was running Virtual Machines to support a Service Automation application (SAWIN) that their employees were using out in the field. With the downtime that they were experiencing in the dispatching process with these on-premise servers, they were looking for a modern replacement of their infrastructure to prevent any more drastic effects to the day to day business.
After doing some research on Google’s website and looking at the list of certified partners, Jeffrey Allison, IT Administrator at Estes, chose to work with Dito.
The Solution
Estes worked with Dito in transitioning their existing infrastructure to the cloud using several Compute Engine instances. The Service Automation application (SAWIN) was installed on these Compute Engine instances with some customizations, and was done to the specifications of what Estes wanted in terms of lack of downtime.
Jeffrey Allison specified for these Compute Engine instances that they run on data replication sites that were close to Estes Services business, with data centers in Atlanta and close to Georgia being used for their application. This solution has impacted all of Estes Services employees out in the field. Their work has improved significantly with the lack of downtime, ensuring that service calls are completed in a timely manner, with a high degree of customer care.
The Benefits
Estes has benefited from its partnership with Google and Dito on multiple fronts. First, on the bookkeeping side, Estes is saving a significant amount of money in their current investment with Google Cloud Platform as their competitors are spending almost double for on-premise hardware that will become dated over time. Secondly, with limited on-premise server data space and resources, Estes server migration to the Google Cloud Platform has benefited from Google’s unlimited server space and resources. Additionally, there have been large cost-saving benefits on the side of not having to own and pay taxes on physical on-premise hardware, but instead run all of their servers on the Google Cloud Platform.
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Not having to worry about hardware downtime has allowed the IT department to focus on the needs of Estes employees in the field, and has allowed for more focus on the business. Jeffrey Allison explains, “Google rewards companies for using all of their products. What I mean by this is by using Google for everything, Google seamlessly integrates all forms of communication for a company like ours. Email, Hangouts, Drive, Docs, Android Smartphones & Tablets, Chromebooks, Adwords, Analytics, Google Cloud Compute for our servers, etc. We even focus on Google Reviews taking pride in the fact that we have over 1700 reviews with a 4.9 out of 5 stars.”
