be able to serve up an average of over 1000 individual briefings a day
I don't want to make a cheap snipe here but you could easily serve 1000 briefings a day over a 256kbit/sec home ADSL uplink
It's just text, 10-20k bytes per report. You could serve dozens of times more data over a £25/month uncapped ADSL line.
This also can't be a server loading issue - unless they are running this on an old laptop, which I am sure they aren't. Maybe it's written in Java?
Something else is going on.