Climat

The company

Climat is one of Australia's longest-established air conditioning, heating and solar businesses, with more than 40 years of experience. The company supplies and installs ducted and split system air conditioning, gas heating, solar panels and batteries for homes across South Australia — and through Climat Commercial, delivers commercial air conditioning projects as well.

Climat is one of Australia's largest Daikin dealers and holds Diamond Dealer status with Mitsubishi Electric. The business operates from seven locations across Adelaide — a head office in Royston Park, showrooms and service centres in St Marys, Holden Hill, Munno Para and Welland, a warehouse in Regency Park, and Climat Commercial in Dudley Park — plus a network of dealers across South Australia and Victoria.

The problem

Climat's technology had been stretched to its limits — slow connectivity, ageing servers, and a patchwork of standalone phone systems were holding the business back.

25 Mbps links and terminal servers

All Climat sites were connected via legacy Telstra MPLS circuits — a mix of ADSL and low-speed fibre connections typically limited to around 25 Mbps. For a business running centralised applications, file storage and user profiles from a data centre, 25 Mbps was nowhere near enough.

The slow WAN links meant that staff couldn't run applications locally. Instead, every user across every site logged into terminal servers via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to access their applications, files and profiles. It was the only way to get acceptable performance over the limited bandwidth — but it came at a cost. The terminal servers were ageing, failing, and running out of storage space. The user experience was poor: shared sessions, limited local device access, and no ability for staff to work from home on a laptop with the same tools they used in the office.

The entire setup was a workaround for slow internet — and it had reached the end of its useful life.

A different phone system at every site

Each Climat location operated its own standalone VoIP phone system. While each individual system worked, they were all different — different brands, different configurations, different call flows, separate bills. There was no integration between sites: calls couldn't overflow from a busy showroom to another location, there was no shared reception or call queue, and if one site's system went down, calls to that location simply went unanswered.

During peak seasonal periods — summer for air conditioning, winter for heating — when call volumes spike significantly, the inability to distribute calls across sites was a real operational problem. Customers calling a busy showroom would get a busy signal or voicemail, even though staff at another location were available to help.

What we did

1 Gbps fibre to every site

The Telstra MPLS network was replaced entirely. Each of Climat's seven Adelaide locations was connected via a dedicated 1 Gbps fibre link back to Caznet's data centre — a 40x increase in bandwidth over the old 25 Mbps connections.

This single change transformed how the business operates. With 1 Gbps of dedicated, low-latency connectivity at every site, staff no longer need terminal servers. They now run applications, access files and load user profiles directly on their own desktops and laptops — thick clients connecting to centralised systems over fast fibre, the way it was always supposed to work.

The performance improvement was immediate and dramatic. Applications that took seconds to load over RDP now open instantly. File access is fast. And because staff are working on proper local machines rather than shared terminal sessions, the overall computing experience is vastly better.

Private cloud and Microsoft 365

With the terminal servers decommissioned, Climat's server infrastructure was consolidated into Caznet's data centre as a private cloud (IaaS) environment — replacing the ageing, failing hardware with modern virtualised infrastructure that's properly resourced, backed up and maintained.

At the same time, the business migrated to Microsoft 365 — Exchange Online for email, SharePoint and OneDrive for document storage, and Microsoft Teams for internal communication. This wasn't just an email migration — it fundamentally changed how Climat's staff work. Because Microsoft 365 is cloud-hosted, staff can now work from home on their laptops with exactly the same tools, files and email they use in the office. That wasn't possible under the old terminal server model, where everything was tied to a session on a server in the data centre.

Unified phone system — 85 handsets across all sites

Every standalone phone system was removed. Caznet deployed a single hosted PBX phone system with approximately 85 handsets across all seven locations, operating as one unified platform.

All sites now share the same call flows, the same auto-attendant, and the same call queues. Calls can overflow between sites automatically — if the St Marys showroom is busy, calls route to Holden Hill or Munno Para where staff are available. Reception at one location can transfer calls to any extension at any other location as an internal transfer. Staff can see the status of colleagues across the business on their BLF keys.

During peak seasonal demand, the system handles high call volumes by distributing them intelligently across all available staff rather than overwhelming one location while others sit idle.

Mobile services for the field workforce

Caznet also provides approximately 20 mobile SIM services — data SIMs for iPads used by field technicians and installers to access cloud-hosted job management and scheduling applications on-site, plus mobile voice services for key staff who need to be reachable when away from their desks.

The result

• 40x bandwidth increase — 1 Gbps fibre at every site, replacing 25 Mbps Telstra MPLS links
• Terminal servers eliminated — Staff work on their own desktops and laptops with direct access to files, applications and profiles. No more RDP sessions on shared, ageing terminal servers.
• Modern cloud platform — Private cloud IaaS for core infrastructure, Microsoft 365 for email, documents and collaboration. Staff can work from home with the same tools they use in the office.
• One phone system for the entire business — 85 handsets across seven sites on a single platform, with overflow between locations, shared call queues, and the ability to handle seasonal demand spikes
• Mobile workforce support — iPad data SIMs and mobile voice services keeping field technicians connected to cloud-hosted job systems
• One provider — Fibre, private cloud, internet, phone system, Microsoft 365 licensing and mobile services all managed by Caznet

Climat went from an environment where every user was working through a terminal server over a 25 Mbps link to one where every site has 1 Gbps fibre, every user has a proper local workstation, every phone is part of a single unified system, and staff can work from anywhere on Microsoft 365. It was a complete transformation — connectivity, infrastructure, communications and mobility — delivered as a single project by one provider.