ESG has been using NinjaOne in the UK since 2021. In this case study, we look at how they’ve utilized NinjaOne to manage their hybrid workforce and drive their business objectives.

Ste Hawkins, Global Head of Corporate IT, and ‘John’, IT Service Support Principle, share their experience and insights into the benefits of partnering with NinjaOne.

“NinjaOne has helped us focus on the bigger things. We wouldn’t have been able to hit many things on our roadmap, if we were having to fight fires in our day-to-day operations, being on the back foot, instead of being proactive with NinjaOne.” – Ste Hawkins, Global Head of Corporate IT

Empowering energy leaders globally, ESG provide innovative technology to help deliver the future promise of energy. ESG has 2 office locations in the UK, as well as bases in US and Japan. New challenges arising from an increasingly hybrid work environment are just part of the job.

Transition to a hybrid work environment

Like many businesses across the UK and the world, ESG had to adapt to work from home seemingly overnight.

However, even before the pandemic hit, the team at ESG were considering a change from their previous IT management system.

“Moving to work from home, SCCM, our previous tool, was difficult to manage” explains Ste.

“Application deployment, handling updates, and generally managing our IT was driving us mad, especially when we were trying to launch a new department within the UK. That sparked off the initial investigation to find a new software.

The pandemic months were quite busy for us! Most employees were on laptops already, with VPNs needed to connect into the office. So, the infrastructure to move to remote working was there, but the transition certainly wasn’t smooth”

One of NinjaOne’s key features is the ability to provide technicians IT management from a single-pane-of-glass.

“NinjaOne gives us complete oversight of device health, right down to a deep analysis, alerts, monitoring software installations, which has been a big help to security. We can see what assets are being used in the business. We didn’t have this previously.”

‘John’ adds, “Everything we need is all on one platform now. There is no need to have multiple different tools and change environments constantly, and the user interface with Ninja is a lot easier to use and manage.”

So, it doesn’t matter where ESG employees are working from now, as Ste and the team have complete visibility and management over their IT assets.

“We really used Ninja to give us full visibility over our IT Ops and it makes IT management easier.”

Security Considerations

ESG considers security to be a top priority.

“We didn’t feel like we had great control over patching of machines, that was something we were always trying to work towards with security to hit that compliance that we needed to.” Explains ‘John’.

Ste noted “Since we’ve partnered with Ninja, patching reports have been hitting 99% or above week on week which is incredible. We’ve even had the board buy in to replace all our IT management systems in the US with NinjaOne because of the high level of achievement from the product means that we board can clearly see the value.”

‘John’ expanded “We have scripts we can run out straight away when we are alerted to any security vulnerabilities that can be fixed through patches, and these can be pushed out on mass.”

“We also recently changed our antivirus – and that was totally seamless. We removed our previous antivirus from all our devices, without a restart, and then push out our new antivirus at the same time.

Ste sums up:

“So we managed to change the antivirus for the whole of our estate completely silently, without any negative impact for the end user. And we wouldn’t have been able to do this without Ninja’s tool set!”

The Relationship is Key

NinjaOne strives to provide customers with the highest level of customer service and satisfaction.

“We love the way that we’re listened to,” Ste says.

“One of the biggest points is the relationship. For a company of NinjaOne’s size, to be agile and be able to listen to customers, build a relationship, and put customer suggestions into the roadmap and deliver, is really the biggest positive. We don’t have that kind of relationship with any other supplier. Big big shout out to you guys!”

‘John’ went on, “We had a great relationship from day one, even from the Sales reps. Then when it came to training and onboarding, from the outset we knew we would need three or four calls from each of our departments to go through the solution and ask their own questions. Ninja were able to book in the meetings pretty quickly and give us all the info we needed.

There were loads of training sessions available for everything we could possibly need.

When we actually went live with NinjaOne and put it to the team, it was very much well received. They really loved it.

The impact on day-to-day work life has been positive!”

Save time, focus on the important things

Ste was keen to emphasize how much time NinjaOne has given back to his IT team.

“From a business case perspective, the pricing was right but more importantly, how much time it has saved us in our day-to-day, you can really see the value in NinjaOne.

“To anyone evaluating Ninja, consider how much time and manpower are you putting into something and how much NinjaOne can alleviate that as a tool.”

“Not only has Ninja helped us save on the cost of solutions, but also the cost of our time. NinjaOne has helped us focus on the bigger things. We wouldn’t have been able to hit many things on our roadmap, if we were having to fight fires in our day-to-day, being on the back foot, instead of being proactive with NinjaOne.”

The takeaway

In conclusion, we asked ESG to share what things they like most about NinjaOne.

For ‘John’, security and IT management are the highlights. “For me, it’s the security aspect. That was somewhere that always seemed to be on the back foot. Now we’re confident that all our machines are up to date from a Microsoft and software point of view.

Remote machine management as well, most users are remote from different locations, and we can use Ninja to manage all our devices no matter where they are, which is critical when you’re a global company with a global team!”

Ste summed up his thoughts,

“ESG and NinjaOne are both tech companies and it aligns really well. NinjaOne helps us to stay agile. NinjaOne provides technology for innovators.”