Blizzards as usual (
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When the snow fell on Christmas, ITonCommand helped CIMCO's employees stay up and running even though blizzards hadn't factored into the reason for hiring the solution provider.In 2006, the people of Denver had a white Christmas. The first blizzard pelted the area right before the holiday, while a second came right on its heels to bury the city in several more feet of snow. The huge snowstorms left many businesspeople in the area completely frozen out of their offices and unable to work.
For the financial advisers of Capital Investment Management Company, though, it was almost business as usual, thanks to ITonCommand, an IT services provider in Denver offering hosted solutions.
"At a lot of companies, employees simply couldn't get to work," said Annette Nueske, marketing manager at ITonCommand, a division of CCD Corporation.
What saved CIMCO was its decision earlier in the year to outsource its IT needs to ITonCommand, including Windows Desktop, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange Server, remote access, security, business continuity and disaster recovery. The service, for which CIMCO pays per-seat monthly fees, supports integration with Windows Mobile and includes a private, centralized network.
"Over Christmas, we had the biggest storm we'd had in over 30 years, and a lot of employees had four or five days that they couldn't come into the office," said Chad Williams, CIMCO's chief operations officer. "At CIMCO, though, we all worked in between shoveling out our driveways."
Custom system builders still hanging on. Click here to read more.
CIMCO's relationship with ITonCommand illustrates how companies can reallocate resources and derive benefits by handing over their IT environments to service providers through managed services or hosted models, for which the customer pays monthly, quarterly or annual fees. By taking this route, a business can cut its IT staffing costs.
Building on success
When cimco first began considering the hosted service, management officials weren't really thinking about snow, sleet or rain. If anything, the company wanted to save money. Officials had concluded early in 2004 that the company was spending too much time on IT issues, so it began looking for a way to save time and money.
"We were like most small businesses and did everything in-house," said Williams. "We had a server here on location and did a five- or six-day rotation to back up our information. We got tired of having people go to the safety deposit box [to store the CD backups] and of paying for our server."
The financial advising company, which had 11 employees and two contractors, decided that it wanted to stop worrying about technology infrastructure so it could concentrate on the more than 400 families who turn to its advisers for help with wealth management, retirement planning, portfolio management and business transition planning.
After hearing about ITonCommand from an employee, CIMCO hired the solution provider for hosted backup and restoration services and to free the time of the employees who had been taking the trip to the safety deposit box. CIMCO also asked ITonCommand to come on-site to provide IT network support.
"CIMCO had its own network server, which we were managing, and it was starting to fail," said Andy Finney, vice president of sales at ITonCommand. "We explained that they could start the vicious cycle of ordering a new server and putting software in, and we could come in and keep it running and they could keep paying us. Or we could get them up and running on the hosted model."
The hosted service would manage all CIMCO's IT tasks and include the added benefit of CIMCO employees being able to log in to their computers from anywhere.
"Now we are on the hosted system, and one of the reasons we moved to it was that it was becoming too difficult for people to work from home," said Williams. "We thought it would be nice for our people to be able to log into their desktops from anywhere."
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