Yesterday saw the opening of Andersons Solicitors Leicester office (Andersons have operated in Nottingham for many years and are an established and well respected law firm) . The opening was held at the guildhall and very nice it was too. I cant recommend Andersons highly enough. We have been fortunate enough to work with them for some time and we think they are great at what they do and frankly.. just a very nice bunch of people.

Andersons Solicitors launched their new Leicester office with a party at The Guildhall, Leicester.

I’m on the right here with Andrew Kelly (Managing Partner) in the centre and Jamie from RBS on the left.

We wish Andersons all the best in Leicester and will be supporting every step of the way. A great night had by all who attended. If you haven’t already please check out the Andersons website to learn a little more about them: www.andersonssolicitors.co.uk

We are pleased to announce that we have attained a Microsoft Gold level competency in virtualization to add to our growing collection of other competencies. We are the first IT support provider in the East Midlands to attain a Gold level from Microsoft (currently the only one too).

PTB-Gold

This is great recognition for our efforts in this area. We have a number of very successful implementations of Microsoft Hyper-V and helped a number of our clients save time and money through consolidation and better utilisation of their hardware. We have a proven track record of delivering great Virtualization solutions and a number of our engineers achieved very high scores in their Microsoft exams – 2 engineers with 100% in more than 1 exam!

We will be working hard to attain more accreditations and would like nothing more than to work with you and demonstrate just what a difference we can make to your IT systems.

PTB are pleased to tell our clients new and old (and hopefully those looking for better IT support) that we are absolutely committed to investing in our hosted systems in order to provide the very best in local cloud and bespoke hosting. We have recently purchased 2 of the latest redundant servers from DELL in order to host cloud based systems, hyper-V cloud and other offerings. These are state of the art multiple CPU, 12 Core CPU machines with buckets of memory and super fast IO, directly attached and iSCSI.

During the test and build phase we have been impressed with these monster servers (and as techies we aren’t that easily impressed). Today i built a test VM (the old fashioned way with disks) of a full Windows server 2008 installation in less than 5 minutes from start to finish. Imagine how quick this will be once have the rapid deployment finalised.

hosting-server1

24 CPU cores anybody! – More news on the hosting services soon. If anybody is interested in this, please let us know. We don’t keep secrets or hide this stuff under a shroud of mystery, we are more than happy to show you how it works and why we do what we do.

Over the past year, Microsoft have made significant changes to the partner network. They’ve addressed the issue that premium service providers like ourselves had that we found it very difficult to differentiate themselves from the multitude of sub standard Microsoft Gold partners.

There is no such thing as a Microsoft Gold Partner and more – this qualification has been dropped completely and Microsoft partners are not allowed to advertise themselves as such and . If you’re thinking of selecting a service provider and you see this logo – question why this logo is still in use.

The new Microsoft Partner network is based around business like ourselves proving what services they can provide by completing competencies – of which there are two levels, silver and gold.

Silver competencies are relatively easy to obtain – you need 2 customer references, a sales assessment and 2 individuals to pass up to 2 exams on the required subject.

Gold competencies are a different matter – Microsoft see these providers as true industry experts and 4 references are required – along with 4 unique individuals obtaining premium expert qualifications of up to 6 exams in a particular topic.

PhillipsTaylorBrown currently have the following competencies and if all goes well today with Sophie’s final exam – we’ll obtain a gold virtualization competency.

MS Logo

Good luck Sophie…

Congratulations to our newest recruit Sophie who yesterday passed her 3rd Microsoft Exam with a perfect 100% score. As part of her path to MCITP and MCSE status we are pleased to be helping Sophie with this through appropriate training and of course real life hands-on experience.

Well done Soph – We are sure there a more great results to come. Watch this space..

PTB are pleased to be published once again in Vital Magazine? -? Tony and I wrote this article about Disaster Recovery and how it impacts the SME market etc. It’s short and sweet as these thing should be but we think it covers all the conceptual angles.. If you are interested drop us a line and we can email you a copy to read through.

Courting disaster by PhillipsTaylorBrown

Courting disaster by PhillipsTaylorBrown

ok – so this post is? a little late..

PhillipsTaylorBrown were very pleased to able to sponsor an award at the 2009 nottingham restaurant awards. We sponsored the award for Nottinghams best Cafe/Deli – Whic I’m delighted to say was won by Delilahs (my perosnal favourite).

Simon Phillips presenting our award for best cafe/deli

Simon Phillips presenting our award for best cafe/deli

A great night out had by all who attended the event held at Colwick Hall and we’d like to say a special congratulations to Iberico World Tapas who won the Best Set Lunch award and also World Service for the best Drinks/Wine list.

After doing some work with various organisations in the UK, we have yet another article in Computer Weekly.. This time from our Managing Director Simon phillips, see his short article below:

Computer-Weekly-Article by Simon Phillips

As we develop the business we find ourselves talking to more and more people and along the way we are meeting some great people and learning alot about what issues businesses are faced with today…

Tony Brown our Technical Director was recently published in Computer Weekly talking about virtualization
, see his article here:

tony-computer-weekly-article

Well done Computer Weekly – you obviously know who to speak to!

<a href=”/Services/virtualization.html”>virtualization</a>

Welcome to PTB Edward, great to have you onboard and part of the team. Let?s take this opportunity to introduce yourself to everyone with 5 quick questions;

In none-techy speak, what?s your new role within PTB?
- Contacting new customers with a view to creating a relationship, that can lead to doing business with them. Offering free advice and help where needed.

Working in an office of Man Utd supporters (myself excepted!), who?s you favourite team?
- My favourite team is FOREST and always will be

Other than John?s haircut, what?s the funniest thing you?ve ever seen?
- My fish jumping out of the tank onto the floor

Outside (or inside) of work, what?s your favourite hobby?
- Football is my favourite hobby, but i like playing my ps3 just as much.

And finally, what would make your best Christmas party?
- I went to blots two years ago and that was the best to date of my Christmas parties

Thanks Edward and welcome to Team PTB
Alex