Companies

First Financial Services, Inc is a full service mortgage brokerage with locations in Maryland, the District of Colombia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. First Financial Services originated in Charlotte, NC in 1991 with one office. Today First Financial operates 15 offices and plans to double that number by the end of 2010. President, Don Landgraff.

Refresh Technologies, Inc is an IT consulting firm located in Charlotte, NC and serving companies in the eastern corridor of North America since 1999. Refresh focuses on next generation IT solutions that reduce costs, increase employee productivity and ensure business continuity. President, Nik Fedele.

Challenge

First Financial needed a scalable, dependable, secure, cost-effective email and documents solution. The primary concern for conducting communications in the financial sector is security. Secondly, Mr. Landgraff was concerned about the cost per additional employee. Furthermore, the solution needed to be easily accessible from anywhere. "FFSi needed a solution that was not going to cost $50,000 every time I opened a new location. Nik explained the plan to me and I liked it. Google Apps has worked beautifully for our organization," states Landgraff. "If IT infrastructure and per employee costs were too high, our planned growth would be inhibitive. Our clients’ bottom line is the top priority for us," comments Fedele. "Refresh Technologies, Inc is a true advocate and advisor to our clients and had worked with FFSi since 2002. Early on, gmail was an obvious choice, eliminating the need for the Exchange server while maintaining a company domain," adds Fedele.

Solution

Refresh suggested retiring the exchange server in 2005. Upgrades and new hardware were needed and Refresh understood FFSi’s long term vision well. Hardware failures were imminent without replacement, which would leave the business stalled. Gmail is reliable and accessible from anywhere and the security is unmatched. Mr. Landgraff made the move to GAPPS, a fully unified communications suite, allowing FFSi to migrate away from a more costly system. In 2007, FFSi moved to Google, saving the company about $250 per person per year. With 150 employees, that is a significant yearly savings. Later that same year, all of the company’s services were moved to a cloud model. The centralization of files provides additional security of company and client files and ease of administration. Employees no longer receive a computer with the suite of Office applications where they store files locally. Instead, they received a login to Google Apps and access to other services and files as needed.

Result

Today, FFSi is growing at the rate of about two offices per month. Refresh gets their new employees up and running even before the bricks and mortar are ready to move into (all core services are in a private cloud.) GAPPS training is an integral part of new employee orientation. The growth is possible because of the drastically reduced costs of adding employees and maintaining the network. By recommending and implementing Google and other cloud services, Refresh has helped FFSi achieve its goal of being a leader in their industry.