eGroup Names ROK Technologies, Mt. Pleasant Waterworks, and South Carolina Farm Bureau as Winners of its 2014 Customer Excellence Awards

eGroup, the Southeast's leading provider of cloud, application and end-user computing services, proudly announced the winners of its 2014 Customer Excellence Awards.

ROK Technologies, Mt. Pleasant Waterworks, and South Carolina Farm Bureau were each recognized in three distinct categories, which included:

• The Impact Award -- best use of public / private / hybrid cloud resources to reduce complexity, increase reliability and/or prepare the business in the event of a disaster.
• The Vision Award -- best use of existing data and information to help the business make impactful and successful business decisions and provide an overall improved view of business operations.
• The Productivity Award -- best use of delivering the most positive and impactful experience to the end-user anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

**The Impact Award: ROK Technologies, Charleston, South Carolina ** ROK, a company that offers a wide range products and services from GIS implementations, consulting and online mapping sites, experienced significant customer growth during 2013, which put a strain on internal infrastructures.Therefore, it needed to scale its infrastructure quickly to support the expanding client base - using the eCloud provided the necessary scale and alleviated the burden of ROK IT staff having to monitor and manage hardware.

But in effort to use the cloud as a further competitive differentiator, ROK wanted to drive a competitive advantage through innovative use of the eCloud. For example, it expanded its Cloud offerings to include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) enabling clients to efficiently integrate their enterprise software with ROK GIS solutions, products and services.

The Vision Award: Mt. Pleasant Waterworks, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina

Faced with a need to more efficiently utilize existing corporate data, Mt. Pleasant Waterworks (MPW) began on a journey in 2013 to develop a business intelligence infrastructure to allow quicker and more intelligent business decisions to be made. MPW had the vision to develop a set of 94 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were determined to be the most important metrics in terms of the overall health of the organization.

Utilizing the 10 attributes of effectively managed water and wastewater utilities, MPW classified these 94 KPIs to fall within distinct categories and then incorporated them into their Strategic Business Plan that is used to guide the organization's success.

As a result of the implementation delivered by eGroup, MPW stakeholders are now empowered with an easy-to-use interface, which provides real-time insight into the organization's most critical business metrics. An added benefit is the ease of generating quarterly and yearly reports that are submitted to executives at MPW; a process that used to take several weeks has been reduced to the automatic generation of Microsoft SQL Server based Reports.

Additionally, greater insight into the data has allowed MPW to improve the accuracy of data in all business critical systems and uncover opportunities for intelligent business decisions that were not possible before.

The Productivity Award: South Carolina Farm Bureau Insurance, Cayce, South Carolina

Keeping end-users happy with their technology and systems while ensuring productivity is a key goal for South Carolina Farm Bureau's IT team. However, as the team began hearing more and more feedback on application latency issues, they knew it was time to act. Facing the prospect of having to refresh several hundred desktops at an estimated cost of $300,000, the IT team focused its efforts on the user as opposed to the tool and decided it was finally time to adopt a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) strategy.

Administrative personnel and QuickBooks(tm) users were the first user group to experience the power of the Thin Clients in relation to their old, clunky desktops. Administrative personnel were severely burdened by 30-minute log in times to QuickBooks and chronic latency issues given the amount of staff using the application. Moving QuickBooks to the cloud and having staff access through VMware Horizon View on their Wyse P20s improved log in times to mere minutes and significantly improved application performance.

The IT department also experienced immediate productivity benefits. For example, using VMware Horizon View they no longer had to audit each and every machine for software versioning, nor did they have to push Adobe Reader updates out individually to each machine.

South Carolina Farm Bureau even captured non-tangible metrics over the course of the project, such as a 90 percent reduction in help desk calls related to specific desktop PC hardware issues, or having to waste time removing harmful, non-business related software from individuals' machines.

Mike Carter, Principal, eGroup said: "At eGroup we have a motto which drives everything we do from planning to execution -- 'we like to make things better.\' The eGroup Customer Excellence Awards recognizes three successful and innovative companies who are making things better and more remarkable for not only their end-users but customers and business partners as well. Congratulations to ROK Technologies, Mt. Pleasant Waterworks and South Carolina Farm Bureau Insurance. We're proud of the business relationship and honored to work on their behalf."

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About eGroup Headquartered in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., eGroup provides innovative cloud, application and end-user computing services to businesses across the Southeast. One of the region's fastest growing companies and winner of the 2013 CRN "Tech Elite 250," eGroup's solutions drive customer revenue while reducing cost to maintain IT infrastructures. Visit http://www.eGroup-us.com or call 1.877.eGROUP.1 (1.877.347.6871) for more information.