Case Study
We had no idea if any of it was actually working
Justin Jeffrey, Managing Director of Mindvision Ltd, on the disk failure that exposed how fragile their old IT setup really was, the redundancy they'd been paying for but never actually worked, and what changed after switching to Atema.
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About Mindvision
A lean team, serving large, demanding clients.
Mindvision Ltd is a Wiltshire-based promotional merchandise and branded corporate gifts distributor, grown from an earlier graphic design and print business. As Managing Director Justin Jeffrey puts it, the job is all about protecting a client's brand at every step: “You're buying wisely from suppliers all over the world, making sure you're not going to brand something that doesn't work, and ensuring that when they get delivered, they are what they're expecting them to be.”
That standard for reliability carries over into the business's own IT: “We're in that small business area, but we are servicing very large companies. Our IT structure needs to be reliable, corporate level, and make sure it handles all the correct failovers.”
The change
Before and after Atema.
In their words
The disk failure, and the failover that finally worked
Mindvision had already been through roughly three IT providers before Atema, none of them proactive. “It was all very firefighting,” Justin said. The gap between what the business believed it had and what it actually had became obvious when two disks failed on their servers, undetected for weeks.
“These are good servers, proper Dell servers. We had RAID set up and running in a configuration we thought was okay, and we had two disks fail. A really serious worry about losing all our data, the worst bit, we had no idea”
The moment their believed-safe setup nearly failed
Atema's first move was to actually test the setup rather than take it at face value: “We proved that by switching things off. There was no proper solid backup, and there was no way of knowing if disks were on the way out.” Justin also named that first meeting as a factor in the decision: “They were very easy to talk to. They understood where we were, and understood what we were trying to be, which was redundant on our IT.”
The switch itself, Justin expected to be disruptive. It wasn't: “That whole process was absolutely painless. They were adding on backup routines but keeping the existing ones there. There was absolutely nothing detrimental to the business.” Mindvision had all the hardware for a dual-internet failover, and had been paying for it for years, but it had never been set up properly, so it had never actually worked. Atema fixed the configuration, then tested it directly, out of hours, to see what would happen.
“For once it actually worked. We'd been paying for it for years, but it actually worked.”
The dual-internet failover test, out of hours
Life since
Proactive instead of reactive
The clearest change, for Justin, is that Atema catches problems before he even notices them. “I'll often get the email: there's something a bit iffy, are you seeing the internet? And I'll look and think, yeah, it's working, but it's failed over.” Day-to-day requests get handled quickly by the team without needing him involved at all.
“One of the team here will drop an email to Atema and it's sorted between them, always with absolute speed and efficiency. There's no question of things being left undone.”
On how day-to-day requests get handled now
He's candid that he isn't always right about what he thinks is going on: “I'm one of those people that knows a little bit to be dangerous, so I'm the worst person to convince. I've been red-faced a couple of times because I've been completely wrong.” Even then, Atema's response is never to make him feel foolish, just to point him gently back in the right direction.
“I completely, 100% trust everything I'm being told. I don't even think about IT now. It used to be an ongoing worry, constantly.”
On the trust built up since switching
Beyond the contract
Help that had nothing to do with the invoice
When asked what stands out about working with Atema, Justin raised something outside the scope of the contract entirely. When his father moved into a care home and couldn't get a phone line installed, Atema set him up with an internet-based phone instead.
“There's no business sense in it whatsoever, but he's done it because he knows it was important to me. That level of helpfulness is outstanding, and that's just one example of many.”
On Atema setting up his father's phone line
His advice
To anyone on the fence about switching
“Weigh up the risk of moving everything, but for us there was no risk. It was straightforward, sensible, and it wasn't expensive. It was literally anything that was obviously needed doing, and I knew it anyway.” He flagged the state of the underlying kit as a common blind spot: “You can't have things running on old equipment these days, everything slows down and bottlenecks. You don't want one piece of equipment stopping all the great stuff you're paying for elsewhere.”
He also framed it as a readiness question, not just a support one: “Are you spending too much time on IT? Do you have downtime? Are you thinking, are we going to be ready for this massive AI revolution that's going to hit everybody, have you got the speed needed?”
“If you think there's room for improvement, you will get it with Atema. There's no question.”
His closing advice to anyone on the fence
“Not everything is about cash, cash, cash, like a lot of IT companies. It's about relationships, and you can see that a mile off. The cash is secondary to knowing you're being looked after, and you actually get that with Atema.”
Justin Jeffrey
Managing Director, Mindvision Ltd
Mindvision is based in Wiltshire, one of the areas Atema covers for on-site IT support, alongside Gloucestershire, Swindon and Bristol.
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