Case Study – Virtual Cabinet

The Client

Virtual Cabinet is a software house that creates industry leading document management software. Relied upon by more than 46,000 professionals worldwide, they transform organisation’s work flows whilst increasing security and efficiencies.

Dominant in multiple sectors such as accounting, property, legal and more, they are a power house of the digital document domain.

The Challenge

Whilst many software titles have transitioned to full SaaS (web browser based model), there are many genres of business software that cannot effectively make the transition and for good reason.

Document management software is one such example of this, owing to the many “hooks” which are required for integrations. For example, SQL databases, customer scanners/printers, 3rd party applications, email functions and more.

Powerful document management suites require “traditional servers”, but the quandary as we all know, is that in today’s Cloud age, customers don’t wish to maintain servers of their own.

Therefore Virtual Cabinet needed a method by which to “Cloudify” their software… I.e. a means by which they could offer their server based software, as a Cloud based service, to their clients.

Why Not Just Use a Hosted Desktop / Private Cloud Service?

Since Cloud2Me’s beginnings back in 2013, we’d had the good fortune of hosting many customers that were already using Virtual Cabinet to great effect. In these examples, our customers were using our Hosted Desktop and Private Cloud services, whereby Virtual Cabinet was installed onto their servers, for which we host as a managed service.

However not all customers wish to use a full Hosted Desktop or Private Cloud service, as many already have their primary IT fabric, organised and catered for. However, they would love to be able to subscribe to a simple, lightweight cloud based Virtual Cabinet service.

The Solution

Recognising the requirement for a lightweight and simple, Cloud based “back-end”, the Cloud2Me and Virtual Cabinet technicians collaborated to produce a “cloud connect” based service.

Effectively we created a purpose built Cloud server, which every Virtual Cabinet client would receive. This server would be fully managed, meaning that items such as updates, backups, security and GDPR compliance, were all catered for on behalf of the customer.

The Virtual Cabinet software client then connects from the locally installed PC based application, securely across the internet. The end user has no degradation in speed, performance or functionality and what’s more, it works from any PC with an internet connection, allowing for ultimate workforce mobility.

New and Existing Virtual Cabinet Customers

Virtual Cabinet named their new Cloud service “Cloud4VC”. And today, the service proves to be just as popular with new Virtual Cabinet customers, as it does with existing customers.

For new customers, they simply request the Cloud hosting option of Cloud4VC during the sales process. The Cloud element is then provisioned as part of their overall Virtual Cabinet induction.

For existing customers, Virtual Cabinet collaborate with Cloud2Me to delicately migrate all of their data and Virtual Cabinet settings from their existing server, across to their new Cloud based Virtual Cabinet service.

Whether a customer is new or existing, Virtual Cabinet and Cloud2Me collaborate effectively, to ensure that the setup & migration experience is truly seamless.

Business as Usual Support

The Cloud4VC service is a union between both Virtual Cabinet and Cloud2Me. It allows each party to provide their specialist skillsets; Virtual Cabinet for the software layer and Cloud2Me for the server layer.

Fortunately our two business’s have come to know each other very well (after almost 10 years of working together!) and what’s great, is that customers truly benefit from our close working relationship;

The Outcome for Virtual Cabinet (and their customers)

For Virtual Cabinet, a sale is no longer determined by the client having a server of their own. Instead Virtual Cabinet can now offer the customer a fully functional Cloud version of their software.

What’s more, is that Virtual Cabinet is packed full of the exact same software features and functionality. For example a migration from an existing customer’s legacy Virtual Cabinet server to Cloud4VC, yields zero functionality differences. It truly is a like for like experience, pre and post Cloud migration.

However, there is a key difference for the customer once they’ve moved to Cloud4VC, they no longer have the burden and expense of managing their own server!

And as Virtual Cabinet now forge ahead as a “Cloud First” software organisation, how has working in partnership with Cloud2Me, helped empower their business;