A PIECE OF CAKE: 

Little Venice Cake Company, a luxury cake designer, chooses Doherty for all its IT support.

“What’s great is having an ad hoc service that acts as a lifeline when we need it. That’s what Doherty do best; they are your in-house IT.”

Little Venice Cake Company (LVCC) is London's leading designer of couture wedding, birthday and celebration cakes. Their service is highly personalised and they rely on their IT systems to keep client records and create designs which can be accessed by the company’s skilled bakers.

LVCC initially contacted Doherty in an emergency; they were experiencing network problems which could have put all their client files at risk. Doherty’s engineer visited LVCC’s Marylebone site and fixed the problem that day. Mich Turner then decided to sign up for a Doherty bronze support contract.

“Our previous IT guy was fine when you could get hold of him, but if he had another job you could leave a message on his mobile and he might not get back to you for 2-3 weeks! We needed someone much more professional, much more reliable and much more geared up for a small, growing business. If we had a problem, we needed a support team that could respond immediately.”

Doherty conducted a full health check of LVCC’s systems and concluded the company would greatly benefit from a Microsoft Small Business Server. This would improve the stability of their network, enable remote working, automate daily back-ups and allow staff to share files, calendars and address books.

As Mich says, “We don’t do IT, we make cakes.  We needed someone who could understand our business and make IT work for us. That’s exactly what Doherty did.”

The support contract gives LVCC staff unlimited access to Doherty’s helpdesk where most issues are resolved over the telephone or remotely. As Mich observes, “the helpdesk are there from eight in the morning to late at night and there really hasn’t been one issue they couldn’t resolve. Nothing seems to faze them. What’s more, 99% of our problems are solved by remote access now, so we don’t have to wait for an engineer to get to us.”

One incident proved the worth of the contract immediately. Mich left her company laptop on a train, but to her relief all the data had been stored on the server during the daily automated system back-up. When she got home, she simply called the Doherty helpdesk who connected her from her home computer to the LVCC network via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and she was able to carry on as normal. No data or time had been lost.

Visit the LVCC website