St. Francis Winery is one of Sonoma County’s most notable wine makers, with award-winning wines sold throughout the country. Established over 50 years ago, St. Francis Winery now has eight vineyards and manages multiple  locations with different network environments.

Rudy Shaw, St. Francis Winery’s IT Director, is responsible for managing the endpoints at each location.

When Shaw first joined the St. Francis Winery team, endpoint management was almost completely outsourced.

“We relied on N-able software for device management, but found ourselves consistently in a reactive mode, addressing immediate concerns and troubleshooting problems rather than advancing our IT department,” Shaw explained. “The lack of visibility into our endpoint management meant that issues often lingered for 1-2 days before resolution, and security risks took weeks to identify.”

Not only that, but endpoint management became extremely expensive. “Without a clear view of our devices, resolving bugs became a time-consuming process, resulting in each fix incurring substantial expenses. Patching fell by the wayside, updates weren’t timely, and security was faulty,” said Shaw.

Shaw’s main goal as the Director of IT is to be the strategic planner for the IT department. Previously, Shaw spent more time trying to fix endpoints than enhancing the business. Shaw needed a solution that could manage day-to-day tasks, automate manual labor, secure his devices, and fit within their budget.

Solution

“What made NinjaOne stand out from other endpoint managers was how simple and easy it is to use. I can knock out ten tasks in NinjaOne in the same amount of time it takes me to do one task in Kaseya or ManageEngine– alternative solutions we scoped,” said Shaw. “After implementing NinjaOne, we cut down our MSP billable hours, which saves us over $72,000 per year while improving our service rate by 90%.”

Now, Shaw can put those dollars toward strategic business enhancements and additional resources for the business. It also gave Shaw a budget to hire an additional technician. However, Shaw soon discovered additional hiring was unnecessary thanks to NinjaOne. “NinjaOne managed everything so effectively we really didn’t need anyone, so we’ve been able to save even more funds,” said Shaw. “I’ve automated so much that I can efficiently manage all our endpoints at each location, while still dedicating 80% of my time to strategic planning and finding ways to improve the business.”

Within two months of implementation, NinjaOne improved St. Francis Winery’s overall endpoint health by 80%. NinjaOne’s script automation took Shaw’s average of 10-15 service calls per week down to just one to two per week. Shaw also used NinjaOne Backup to create restorable images to expedite the replacement of a company server. In the past, installing new versions of VMware on older servers meant waiting on extremely slow data transfers. With NinjaOne Backup, Shaw simply installed VMware on the replacement server, took an image of the existing VMs, then loaded the VM images back onto the server using NinjaOne Backup’s restore process. “Something that would’ve taken me four or five days, took me one day with NinjaOne Backup,” said Shaw.

“What’s really cool about using NinjaOne to manage multiple company locations is that I can easily monitor every location from the same pane of glass. If one location is having an issue, I create a script and simply duplicate it for all three locations,” said Shaw.

“With NinjaOne, I’m not constantly trying to put out fires. The platform and support team are extremely proactive in helping us manage our
endpoints,” said Shaw. “I love that it’s an all-in-one, powerful yet simple product that just keeps getting better.”