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As a specialist corporate finance and corporate broking house , Westhouse Securities, which was recently bought out from merchant bank, Brown Shipley , helps small and medium-sized public and private businesses achieve their ambitions. Working in partnership with its clients, it address es a range of key corporate finance and strategic issues. Business typically revolves around smaller quoted plcs with a value of up to £100million and associated institutional fund managers. Towards the end of 2003, Westhouse was faced with a challenge. On February 9 2004 , Westhouse Securities would spin out from Brown Shipley, itself part of Kredietbank Luxembourg , an employer of nearly 4,000 people throughout Europe . Eighteen people would be relocating to two offices in London and Manchester ; all client data and ongoing business would be moving with them; gigabytes of data needed to be backed-up ready for transfer; and networks and servers needed to be hooked up and integrated with existing PCs. It needed to be done over a weekend. Martin Eales, an Assistant Director of in the Corporate Finance department , was given responsibility for the move. Whilst not exactly a poisoned chalice, Eales admits that the move itself was 'interesting': 'Physically, all we were taking with us was our PCs. Everything else needed to be installed, email needed to be secure and up and running and all our data needed to available the minute we started on Monday morning.' Eales says. The clock started ticking at 5.30pm on Friday night. Eales and his colleagues had to be absolutely certain that their chosen service supplier could commit to the short time-scale. There are never any guarantees in business, but Eales was confident that all would be well: 'The professionalism and completeness of the proposal that Wavex provided allied to the trust they engendered meant that I was as comfortable as possible.' Eales says. 'I also knew they'd done this sort of thing before.' The support contract came as a direct result of the planning work done in the run up to that weekend. According to Eales however , there is nothing like seeing a team in action: 'It is easy to think that all IT suppliers are the same. Wavex could obviously provide us with the support we needed, particularly their remote active monitoring and support. But the main issue was their attitude to customer service. I know it wasn't part of their job, but it was great to have a supplier so committed that the engineers were literally helping us move desks after the removal men and builders had all gone . I believed their attitude to support would be the same.' So what is the main difference between being in a large company with a team of in-house engineers and a supplier like Wavex? Eales is quite clear about this: 'Having in-house staff is very comfortable - there's someone there to call and they are a floor or two away from you.' But according to Eales they are often not as accountable: 'You don't really know when they are going to turn up. The main difference is being treated as a client rather than just another item on a list. Wavex's support is spot on - they have a professional outfit that does the job.'
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