Astute Investing

/ Summary

John Wotherspoon of Astute investing is a true advocate of the Apple range of hardware and software. However, after successfully using the Apple platform when starting Astute Investing, he started to realise that the financial sector was generally locked into Windows and did not share his appreciation for Apple. As the company grew, it became apparent that there were certain financial tools that would not be available via the Mac platform.

/ The Issue

Previous to LeetGeek, Astute Investing was using a virtualised installation of Windows in order to run the PC software. While this enabled access to the software, it was certainly not conducive to an efficient workflow, however. In addition to this, Astute had to manage multiple software licenses for its applications in dual operating system environments.

John contacted LeetGeek to request advice on the situation. The existing installation was made up of a mixture of iMacs, MacBook Pros and a Mac Mini Server. Parallels software was utilised to access Windows 7. Email was hosted externally with a third party. In this case, it was very important to remain platform-agnostic and develop a solution to the problem that took into account both the invested hardware, staff knowledge and industry preference.

/ The Solution

Our solution was to provide a new Windows Small Business Server utilising the Windows 7 Pro retail licences from the Parallels Virtual Machines to install clean Operating Systems in place of the previous Mac OSX. LeetGeek developed scripts for converting the Pages and Numbers files into Word and Excel. Email was migrated from third-party servers to the new small business server and advanced backup was configured to provide minimum downtime in a disaster recovery scenario.

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