Searchlight is an established and recognised supplier of decorative lighting to the very best specialist lighting retailers, multi-national chains and distributor partners across the globe. Founded in 1945, Searchlight have over 75 years of experience to meet the diverse, ever-changing needs of the lighting market and their trading partners around the world.

Legacy:

T-Tech have been providing third line support to Searchlight for over 10 years, managing only their infrastructure. Up until recently, their internal IT team have been supporting all further 1st and 2nd line support to users, and as a growing company, they recognised the need to transfer over more responsibility to T-Tech.
As a long-standing T-Tech client their journey began in a pre-cloud world, with a good quality and reliable infrastructure on premise. As the business developed over the years, their requirements changed to a hybrid cloud style, with both workers both in the office and at home. Now, they have evolved to the stage of a full cloud migration, resulting in the need for more IT support.
Searchlight requirements:
  • Tighten security measures and defences
  • Re-evaluate how the internal IT team operate
  • Become more cloud centric
  • Free up time for the internal team to focus on projects
  • Outsource 1st and 2nd line support to the experts
Having built a strong rapport with the IT manager and internal team over the years, Searchlight took the opportunity to move 1st and 2nd line IT support over to T-Tech, in order to better serve their users. With over 130 users across 2 sites, their internal responsibilities to support all users were becoming too demanding.
Their cloud first approach meant they also wanted to reduce on premise servers and move to more efficient cloud applications – namely Azure and SharePoint. Bringing their entire system into the cloud would give them broader opportunities to further grow the business to align with technology. This fully aligns to their agile working requirements, where users can work wherever they are.

Outcome:

T-Tech now provide Searchlight with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line support, with clear roles and responsibilities. Feedback from users has been hugely positive, as T-Tech engineers are able to deal with more focused queries. It has also taken the burden off the internal IT team, and allowed them to widen their scope to becoming application specialists. Onsite engineers still manage their warehouses, but T-Tech have a good relationship with these engineers and support them wherever needed.
Their increase in the use of cloud technology has also reduced many security risks and has provided much more flexibility to their IT estate. The adoption of Teams has also been a huge success within the business allowing for better collaboration and tracking of business processes, instead of lengthy spreadsheets and multiple email chains.