Dave Graesser, managing director of Tek Response Ltd, organised the event with the schools following a previous succesful event of the same back in 2009. Dave recruited the assistance of fellow dragons Mike Burnage managing director of The Academy for Chief Executives, Steve Turner director at CHH CoNex, Peter Maclean managing director of Petrel Limited, and Diane Rance, director at Creating Value with People. Click for event and dragons flyer

Students from Years 7 and 8 from President Kennedy School and Years 11 and 12 from Heart of England School bravely stepped into the den to pitch their ideas.

The most successful came from a Year 12 student, Mark Hawkswood who is running a pig rearing business. He buys pigs at about eight weeks old and keeps them on the farm where he lives until they are six months old and then he sells them to restaurants and the public. The Dragons were impressed with his venture and agreed an investment to enable him to increase his numbers and grow his business.

Students from President Kennedy School were also successful - the Dragons invested in Bailey Lucking towards his stationary business venture; Louise Ball and Keeley Weston towards their hand made cards; and Mohammed Imran, Shaun Bowes, Lewis Reed, Harpreet Bahra and Kyle Thompson for their confectionary business.

In addition, the Dragons offered sound business advice.

Don’t worry, this decision wasn’t the result of a particularly stressful IT installation project, but Dave Graesser's way of personally supporting a fantastic organisation called The Shakespeare Hospice.

Every year, The Shakespeare Hospice helps hundreds of families affected by serious illness and the care they provide is both invaluable and inspirational. This work is almost entirely funded by the public’s generosity; less than 5% of the Hospice’s funding comes from the NHS and that is why Dave wanted to do the sponsored Skydive for the Hospice.

Click here to watch the Skydive on You-Tube

NetApp’s long track record of innovation started in 1992 with the world's first networked storage appliance. The groundbreaking technologies they have continued to deliver ever since – such as their dual parity RAID DP, snapshots or deduplication – and their unique Unified Storage architecture help our clients protect their data, simplify and accelerate business operations, and reduce IT costs significantly.

With NetApp's innovative solutions we can safely promise you significant savings in time and money. As a company, Tek Response does like to practice what we preach - and as such we too have made significant investment in our own internal infrastructure comprising of NetApp's FAS 2020 for our storage area network, connected via fibre to a number of physical host servers running Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2.

Contact us to discuss your storage challenges and requirements.

April 2010 Tek Response MD Dave Graesser joins Stimulating Demand High Growth Programme

Dave Graesser, managing director at Tek Response attended Ninestiles School in AcocksGreen, Birmingham in March; along with various other volunteers from local businesses to facilitate in an employment event. The day started with a brief training overview of the day. Each helper was given an individual table number to sit at, and the 140 year 9 students (13 to 14 year olds) were shown into the room and split into groups of 4 at each table. The students had to show how they used their skills and had to fill out a sheet on how they used Maths daily at home or at school. Dave Graesser commented “It was great to be able to see the students working out how they use maths everyday in their lives. In addition, we discussed and explored how maths is used everyday in the workplace - re-affirming how important maths skills are."

Tek Response have helped clients over a number of years benefit through the use of a wide range of Citrix technologies.

Citrix offers a dynamic end-to-end virtualization system that transforms desktops and applications into on-demand services enabling users to work securely and productively from anywhere. Citrix virtualization revolutionizes desktop management and simplifies datacenter operations.

Citrix XenDesktop
Reduce desktop management costs up to 50 percent

Citrix XenApp
In use by over 100 million users worldwide, XenApp is the de facto standard in application virtualization

Read more or contact us to discuss your challenges and/or needs

 

This convenient and easy-to-use service offers a secure and fully compliant way to dispose of any unwanted IT equipment. The GreenIT Box will help ensure you meet your legal IT disposal requirements, at a much lower cost-per-item than the nearest comparable service. Read more.

NetApp’s long track record of innovation started in 1992 with the world's first networked storage appliance. The groundbreaking technologies they have continued to deliver ever since – such as their dual parity RAID DP, snapshots or deduplication – and their unique Unified Storage architecture help our clients protect their data, simplify and accelerate business operations, and reduce IT costs significantly.

With NetApp's innovative solutions we can safely promise you significant savings in time and money. Contact us to discuss your storage challenges and requirements.

We recognise that everyone needs to cut costs where they can and as a result of Tek Response migrating from 0870 numbers to the equivalent 0370 numbers, calling Tek Response on our new 03 number means you will only pay the equivalent of calling an 01 or 02 number. Read more.

Press Release:                                                

Tek Response Limited, a leading IT Solutions and Support provider, has acquired the business of Nottingham based security specialists, Presence Limited. The acquisition between the two Midlands based companies builds on the continuing growth and success of Tek Response and further strengthens their position within the security market.

Managing Director of Tek Response Limited Dave Graesser set up the business in 1999 and sees this latest purchase as part of their future strategy. Dave Graesser stated "The acquisition of Presence represents a further step in fulfilling our growth plans, and brings to Tek Response a specific IT security division which helps to strengthen our position in the IT arena and enables us to deliver clear benefits to our growing client base. The two companies complement each other and by bringing them together we can build on the strengths of both companies."

Presence Security Solutions, the long established network and Internet security company is an ideal match for Tek Response. They bring a team of dedicated security personnel with accreditations to supply solutions from some of the most respected security vendors in the world. Presence Security Solutions has over twelve years of experience successfully supplying and supporting large organisations and companies across the UK including financial institutions, professional bodies, government authorities, retailers, commercial, industrial organisations and charities, ensuring that they are secure enough to do business.

Presence Security leading edge solutions include firewalls, Virtual Private Networks, anti-virus products, Email and Web content screening solutions, secure authentication and intrusion detection. Products include Check Point, Symantec, Sophos, Clearswift (MIMEsweeper), Lumension, Blue Coat, Nokia, and Websense.

Tek Response support a large and diverse client base covering the public, private and voluntary sectors including manufacturing, engineering, arts, education, local government, national trust, charity, printing, legal, financial and food & beverage industries; and will be increasing this list through Presence Limited whose client base covers in excess of eighty businesses. Their combined client base will benefit from the additional support resource and expertise available.

Tek Response continues to excel by retaining Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status three years after initial "Gold Certified Partner" accreditation. This demonstrates our commitment to supporting Microsoft based technologies.

Birmingham City Council (BCC) became a client of Tek Response in April 2008, taking out a support contract for their Box Office and Ticketing operations based at Birmingham Central Library, The Old Rep Theatre, and the Gas Hall Exhibition Space at the Museum and Art Gallery.

Artsfest is a city-wide annual festival run by BCC, now in it’s 11th year, showcasing the region’s diverse range of Arts organisations and performing groups, from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Birmingham Royal Ballet, to unsigned bands, dance groups, and community-based projects. As part of BCC’s audience development initiatives, making Arts events more attractive and accessible to a wider range of people, a box office facility was required for the duration of the festival weekend, offering discounted tickets for organisations and performances such as the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, the Gigbeth Music Festival, and Birmingham Hippodrome.

Tek Response assessed the needs of BCC in providing the box office facility, and were contracted to provide consultancy to achieve the aim of an Artsfest-specific ticketing function. Tek Response configured the required infrastructure, and provided ticketing system and database expertise to create the best structure for BCC’s and additional organisations’ ticketing requirements for the duration of the festival.

BCC’s box office managers continue to partner with Tek Response to meet their ongoing support needs, as well as customised solutions for one-off and unusual ticketing projects.

Established in 1990, Torquil Clark, through organic growth and acquisitions, is the fastest growing Independent Financial Adviser in the U.K.

Two years ago, Torquil Clark identified they wanted help in building an IT infrastructure to support their business strategy.  At the time, Tek Response had recently become involved in providing support to their internal IT team when required.  Torquil Clark approached us to discuss developing an IT strategy that would support their business as it moves forward.

As part of this initial work, Tek Response carried out a comprehensive audit of the current IT infrastructure.  In addition to assessing their current equipment, we interviewed a number of key senior managers to understand their requirements from a business perspective and how successfully their needs were being met – or where this could be improved.

Based on our research, Tek Response presented a comprehensive report to the board which included recommendations on key areas to consider focusing their investment in order to deliver maximum return for the business.  

Due to several factors, including the scale of the potential changes they would be looking to implement and a change at Torquil Clark which saw the Skipton Building Society take an 86% share in the company – the decision to implement a new IT strategy was delayed for almost 2 years. 

Early in 2008, Torquil Clark revisited the original findings and decided to move ahead with a major overhaul of their IT infrastructure.  Over the coming months, they undertook research into the market place and spoke to a number of companies about their requirements.  By August 2008 they had completed their ‘due diligence’, including a review involving their major shareholder Skipton Building Society and a review of the offering from other IT companies.  Having looked to the open market investigating the alternatives available, they elected that Tek Response would best be able to fulfil their requirements and instructed us to undertake a significant technology refresh. 

The project is being undertaken over a number of months and will be completed by the end of November 2008.  We expect to be able to share with you further details in the form of a case study in the coming months.   

Tek Response has successfully undertaken numerous projects since 1999 for Rothschild Waddesdon Limited / The Alice Trust at Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury, one of the UK’s largest National Trust sites. 

As part of Tek Response’s proactive preventative maintenance monitoring service, it was identified and brought to our client’s notice that the core SQL Server storage system was approaching capacity. The IT systems supporting over 100 users at RWL and The Alice Trust include the traditional office network environment supporting administration and accounts, as well as ticketing, catering and gift/wine shops.

After consideration, we established that it was more cost effective for RWL and The Alice Trust to acquire a new higher capacity server; however our solution had to be implemented with no disruption, with the data transfer to be completed in just one day and of course with no data loss whatsoever.

We managed the process seamlessly, and in addition implemented Double Take to provide business continuity in the event of a server failure, should the worst happen.

Waddesdon Manor was built (1874-1889) by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to display his outstanding collection of art treasures and to entertain the fashionable world.  After Ferdinand's death in 1898, his sister and heir, Miss Alice (and hence the organization name The Alice Trust), maintained the house, collection and grounds to impeccable standards.  In 1957, it was bequeathed to the National Trust and opened to the public.

Birmingham City Council chose Tek Response as their Ticketing Box Office support partner to provide infrastructure, support and consultancy services for its computerised box office system.

BCC identified a future area of development they wished to explore in how they utilize and access this system - desiring access from outside the confines of the box office physical location.  

To illustrate one scenario in which this would assist: generally members of the public would book tickets in advance of an event, over the Internet or from the Box Office counter at the Central Library.  This includes events not held at traditional venues – such as the ‘Fireworks Fantasia’ in one of Birmingham’s large municipal parks.  However, if individuals forgot or hadn’t received their tickets, there was no traceability of the booking on-site, to prove they had indeed made the purchase, or to resolve any queries relating to pre-booked tickets.

Tek Response designed a solution to allow remote access to the box office system database from an off-site location – that enables the venue to easily identify and confirm bona fide claims - and has successfully completed proof of concept testing.

In 2004, Tudor Grange School, one of Solihull’s largest Secondary Schools, chose Tek Response as their IT solutions and support partner. 

Initially, Tek Response’s challenge was the introduction of a new Curriculum storage server, Exchange email migration and gigabit backbone network implementation – and at the same time migrating 1,500 users with over 600 PCs and laptops.

Through the various projects and services we have continued to deliver over the last 4 years, we have proved our solutions are delivered to schedule, within budget, perform, and importantly prove to be stable.

As testament to our ability to continually meet and serve the school’s needs, we have been awarded another major implementation project throughout the 2008 summer holidays where we will once again migrate the 1,500 users, to 5 new state of the art server systems taking advantage of today’s processing power and storage capacities. In addition we’re consolidating the old servers to perform independent functions such as automatically managing the distribution of updates that are released through Microsoft Update to computers in their network.

Paul Day, the School Manager, proved to be very impressed “These projects were undertaken professionally and have resulted in very successful outcomes. We found the staff of Tek Response helpful and flexible.”

Having been chosen by the Board of Birmingham Arts Information Technology in the summer of 2007 as their preferred partner to help maintain service provision to several Arts venues within Birmingham, Tek Response has now agreed new contracts with many venues to continue this service. Find out how Tek Response was chosen to work with BAIT by reading our case study

Continued growth at Tek Response has led to the opening of a new Birmingham Centre office. The new offices are primarily to support additional members of the technical team and enable Tek Response to have proximity to some of their newest clients based in the city centre. Due to the specific support requirements of their new clients, the new offices were acquired to enable swift on-site response should this be required. This again demonstrates the flexibility of Tek Response to adapt to meet the needs of their client base.

Tek Response continues to excel by retaining Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status two years after initial accreditation. This demonstrates our commitment to supporting Microsoft based technologies.

Tek Response Further Distinguishes Itself by Earning Microsoft Competencies In Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Licensing Solutions

Redditch - 7 JULY 2006- Tek Response today announced it has attained Gold Certified status in the Microsoft Partner Program with competencies in Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Licensing Solutions, recognizing Tek Response's expertise and total impact in the technology marketplace. As a Gold Certified partner, Tek Response has demonstrated expertise with Microsoft technologies and proven ability to meet clients' needs. Microsoft Gold Certified Partners receive a rich set of benefits, including access, training and support, giving them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Tek Response through gaining an understanding of their client's key business needs, help their client's define and implement IT strategies that result in IT infrastructure that supports the client reaching their business goals and key drivers. Services include consultancy, solution delivery, support services and even complete outsourcing of IT requirements.

"We are extremely pleased to have attained Gold Certified status in the Microsoft Partner Program. This allows us to clearly promote our expertise and relationship with Microsoft to our clients," said Dave Graesser, Tek Response Managing Director. "The benefits provided through our Gold Certified status will allow us to continue to enhance the offerings that we provide for clients."

Karl Noakes, Director of the Partner Development Group at Microsoft, said: "Customers are looking for partner companies that can bridge the gap between their business demands and technology capabilities. They need to trust in someone that can act as an expert adviser for their long-term strategic technology plans. Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, which have certified expertise and direct training and support from Microsoft, can build a positive customer experience with our technologies. As a Microsoft Gold partner, Tek Response can offer its clients the reassurance of a truly professional organisation with the backing of Microsoft's resources."

As one of the requirements for attaining Gold Certified Status, Tek Response had to declare a Microsoft Competency. Microsoft Competencies are designed to help differentiate a partner's capabilities with specific Microsoft technologies to clients looking for a particular type of solution. Each competency has a unique set of requirements and benefits, formulated to accurately represent the specific skills and services that partners bring to the technology industry.

Competency: Networking Infrastructure Solutions
Microsoft Gold Certified Partners enrolled in the Networking Infrastructure Solutions Competency have proved their expertise in implementing technology solutions based on either the Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server operating system, Small Business Server 2000 and Windows Small Business Server 2003. These implementations may include crafting solutions that connect Windows-based servers, PC locations and the Internet; installing a server farm; or building a small-business Windows Server stand-alone solution that includes file and print capabilities.

"We place tremendous value on our partners, which help us deliver solutions and applications to customers," Karl Noakes, Director of the Partner Development Group at Microsoft. "Solutions competencies provide an integrated partnering framework that recognizes an enterprise's expertise and rewards it for the effect it has in the technology marketplace. It also allows companies to demonstrate for customers their knowledge of building solutions based on Microsoft technologies, such as setting up networks using Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Small Business Server 2003."

Competency: Licensing Solutions
The Licensing Solutions Competency is for partners that have a proven expertise in serving clients with highly challenging, competitive and complex licensing and software asset management (SAM) environments. To further recognize partners' expertise, Microsoft provides the License Delivery specialization, designed for partners skilled in the design, recommendation and acquisition of license options for Microsoft technology. The Software Asset Management specialization is designed for partners that combine licensing skills with strong diplomatic skills to help clients understand and address compliance issues and help them realize and experience the ongoing benefits and efficiencies of SAM.

"Partners play a critical role in helping customers acquire and manage their software licenses," said Karl Noakes, Director of the Partner Development Group at Microsoft. "The Licensing Solutions Competency makes it easy for customers to find recognized partners that can assist them with their licensing needs. This improves a partner's reputation as a valued provider of long-term Microsoft License Delivery and Software Asset Management services."

The Microsoft Partner Program was launched in December 2003 and represents Microsoft's ongoing commitment to the success of partners worldwide. The program offers a single, integrated partnering framework that recognizes partner expertise, rewards the total impact that partners have in the technology marketplace, and delivers more value to help partners' businesses be successful.

About Tek Response
Founded in 1999, Tek Response is a recognised IT consultancy, services and solutions firm that help businesses ensure that IT supports their business needs and key goals.