blueAPACHE celebrates seamless transition to remote working with virtual event

blueAPACHE celebrates seamless transition to remote working with virtual event

COVID-19 instantly changed the way we live, work and interact.

As lockdown commenced in March, we asked our #teamblue tribe to adapt to new remote working arrangements while maintaining the same level of professionalism — to ensure seamless delivery of our client promise: to deliver their applications and secure their data.

Our team rose to the occasion, exhibiting every essence of our #teamblue values.

The inaugural #teamblue family virtual pizza party

As a token of appreciation, an invitation was extended to our staff and their families to join the inaugural #teamblue family virtual pizza party.

The virtual event, catered by blueAPACHE, saw pizzas delivered to the doors of 120 families across the globe:

• Perth
• Melbourne
• Sydney
• Brisbane
• And our #teamblueUSA members in Maryland and Florida

On behalf of blueAPACHE, we would like to say a very big thank you to our incredible #teamblue.

What 120 households says about the company

The logistics are a small detail that carries real information.

Delivering to 120 households simultaneously, across four Australian states and two US states, in the middle of a pandemic, required coordinating multiple delivery providers across multiple time zones for a single moment. It is the kind of exercise that only works if someone has current, accurate details for every person in the organisation and their household — which is itself a marker of an organisation that knows its people.

It also dates the company's international presence concretely. The #teamblueUSA members in Maryland and Florida reflect blueAPACHE's operations serving clients across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Asia and North America — supported by points of presence in London, live since 2019, and Singapore, live since 2020.

The claim being celebrated

The phrase seamless transition is doing real work in the title, and it is worth separating from the pizza.

Every organisation described its 2020 transition favourably. Very few could evidence the claim, and the difference came down to platform decisions made years earlier.

For blueAPACHE, the evidence is external and independently assessed. The company won ARN Mid-Market Partner of the Year in the 2020 Innovation Awards on the basis of a submission that documented how clients used the emPOWER consumption-based model to rapidly scale services supporting remote working during the lockdowns. A judging panel reviewed that evidence and awarded the category — for the second consecutive year.

An MSP saying its own transition went well is a claim. An independent panel confirming its clients' transitions went well is closer to proof.

Why the consumption model was the deciding factor

The constraint in March 2020 was rarely technical. It was the speed at which capacity could change.

Under a traditional model, supporting a sudden increase in remote access means specifying hardware, seeking capital approval, procuring in a global supply crunch, and installing — while finance teams were freezing discretionary spend. That path was effectively closed.

Under a consumption model, capacity is a service that scales, with no procurement cycle between the decision and the outcome. And when demand normalised, the same mechanism worked in reverse — the half that is less often mentioned, and the half that determines whether the economics hold across a full cycle.

The honest counterweight

A celebration page should not be the whole story, and blueAPACHE's own commentary elsewhere was more balanced. Managing director Chris Marshall described his personal experience of working from home as a mixed blessing, and noted that the team welcomed more regular check-ins — an explicit acknowledgement that distributed working required a deliberate change in cadence rather than simply continuing as before.

The security picture over the same period was also genuinely difficult across the industry. KPMG found that remote working significantly increased the risk of a successful ransomware attack, driven by weaker controls on home networks and higher click rates on pandemic-themed lure emails — and that the pressure to deploy remote access within days saw some organisations inadvertently compromise on security.

Which is precisely why the distinction between a properly architected digital workspace and improvised remote access mattered so much, and why organisations that had made the platform investment early came through the period in a materially different position from those that had not.

What it became

The #teamblue framing in this post was not a one-off. blueAPACHE formalised the same proposition into an organisational structure in November 2022, launching a dedicated Experience Division that brought service delivery, the end-user help desk, talent acquisition and people operations together under a single general manager — on the reasoning that employee experience and customer experience are the same problem viewed from two sides.

A pizza delivered to 120 households is a gesture. The division is the same idea with a budget and an accountable owner.

Frequently asked questions

What was the #teamblue family virtual pizza party? An event blueAPACHE catered for staff and their families during the 2020 lockdowns, with pizzas delivered to 120 households across Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and to #teamblueUSA members in Maryland and Florida.

What does the delivery to 120 households indicate? The page reads it as two things. Operationally, coordinating simultaneous deliveries across four Australian states and two US states in the middle of a pandemic only works if the organisation holds current, accurate details for every person and household. Geographically, the Maryland and Florida members date blueAPACHE's international presence, supported by points of presence in London from 2019 and Singapore from 2020.

Is the "seamless transition" claim evidenced, or just asserted? The page is careful about this. It points to blueAPACHE's win of ARN Mid-Market Partner of the Year in the 2020 Innovation Awards — a second consecutive year — awarded on a submission documenting how clients used the emPOWER consumption-based model to scale services for remote working. The distinction the page draws is that an MSP describing its own transition favourably is a claim, while an independent panel assessing its clients' transitions is closer to proof.

Why did a consumption model matter more than technology in March 2020? Because the binding constraint was the speed at which capacity could change, not whether the technology existed. A traditional model required specifying hardware, obtaining capital approval, procuring during a global supply crunch and installing — at the moment finance teams were freezing discretionary spend. A consumption model makes capacity a service that scales without a procurement cycle, and scales back down again when demand normalises.

Does the page acknowledge any downside to remote working? Yes, deliberately. It records that managing director Chris Marshall described working from home as a mixed blessing and that the team welcomed more regular check-ins — an acknowledgement that distributed working needed a changed cadence. It also cites the KPMG finding that remote working significantly increased ransomware risk across the industry, driven by weaker home network controls and higher click rates on pandemic-themed lures.

What did the #teamblue idea eventually become? A dedicated Experience Division, established in November 2022, bringing service delivery, the end-user help desk, talent acquisition and people operations under one general manager — on the reasoning that employee experience and customer experience are the same problem seen from two sides.

Related

• Careers at blueAPACHE
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• About blueAPACHE
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• Cloud services — the consumption-based model
• emPOWER Cloud
• Collaboration
• Security services — the remote-working risk picture
• Managed services
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