Case Study: Transforming Cooper & Tanner's IT Infrastructure

Modernising IT for Cooper & Tanner

Cooper & Tanner has been selling property in the West Country since 1910. Today the business employs 120 people across 11 offices, mostly in Somerset, with one in Wiltshire, and its work extends well beyond residential sales into property management, livestock auctions, professional valuations, and agricultural expertise.

It's a traditional firm with a modern approach, and that second half was the problem. The technology underlying the business had not kept pace with how it actually worked.

Contents

1. The Challenge
2. Our Solution
3. The Net9 Framework
4. The Result
5. Hear it from Cooper & Tanner

The Challenge

Cooper & Tanner came to Netitude frustrated with their previous IT provider, specifically its responsiveness and the depth of support on offer. For a business with 11 offices that depend on the same systems, a slow-to-respond IT partner isn't an inconvenience. It's lost working hours, repeated across every branch.

The day-to-day symptoms were familiar: email server problems, machines that had become sluggish, network connectivity that dropped, and downtime that arrived often enough to be planned around. In an appointment-driven business, that cost is concrete. It's a valuation that doesn't get booked, a chain that doesn't get chased, or a buyer left waiting while someone restarts something.

What Cooper & Tanner didn't have was a view of the whole picture, or a strategy that went beyond fixing whatever had broken most recently.

Our Solution

We started with a Technical Alignment Audit, working through Cooper & Tanner's existing systems, processes and policies rather than just the things currently causing pain. One cause sat behind most of the symptoms: outdated and failing IT infrastructure. That audit produced a Net9 alignment score, and the score became the baseline for a prioritised plan.

The work itself came down to three things:

• The servers: the recurring server failures were the heart of it, and the source of the slow performance, the downtime and the network disruption. We replaced them with cloud-based storage and backup, which resolved the instability rather than managing around it.
• The hardware: every company computer was brought up to standard, so staff could reach documents, files and email without fighting the machine first.
• The people: our Projects team ran on-site training sessions across the business, so the new systems were actually used rather than merely installed.

Cooper & Tanner were assigned a dedicated Virtual IT Director, Josh Bradley, who worked alongside the team through the transition and continues to own the forward plan.

The Net9 Framework

Our work with every client runs through Net9, our framework for giving a business full visibility across nine key delivery areas:

1. Business continuity protection
2. Cloud platforms
3. Scalable technology estate
4. Licensing and legal
5. Network infrastructure and wireless
6. Connectivity and collaboration
7. Threats and vulnerabilities
8. Power, environment and ESG
9. Standardised, efficient, scalable systems

Rather than fixing problems one at a time, Net9 lets us see the whole picture and build a roadmap that keeps working as the business grows. Read more about the Net9 process.

The Result

Replacing the server removed the root cause rather than just the symptoms, and downtime fell accordingly. Staff across all 11 offices work on hardware fit for the job, with files and email reachable from wherever they are, and the recurring tech frustrations and data loss that used to punctuate the working week have gone.

Security and compliance were brought up to a standard appropriate to the client data an estate agency holds, which matters more each year, not less.

The more durable change is how IT gets managed. Cooper & Tanner moved from a reactive model, where problems surface only after they are already costing someone time, to proactive planning owned by someone whose job is to look ahead.