ATC’s Goodwin Spearheads Move to High-Performance, Fully Managed Network with Big Bandwidth
Established on the innovative premise that the HVAC business is a relationship business, Enervise is the HVAC service, maintenance, installation and building automation controls expert for many of the Midwest’s premier healthcare, education, industrial institutions and commercial office buildings.
The Enervise headquarters and Cincinnati Service Center is located at 10226 Alliance Rd, in Blue Ash, Ohio. The Enervise team of 110 employees earns customer loyalty through its total commitment to smooth and efficient operation of each client’s “brick and mortar” building(s). Unfortunately, a move to the public cloud in early 2018 significantly impeded the productivity of each employee due to their inability to access vital customer files and business applications.
One of the primary applications is Enervise’s SamPro business software specialized for the HVAC industry. SamPro is an all-encompassing application that handles field service management, workflow management, accounting, inventory, documents and pictures, and subcontractors. Enervise moved their instance of SamPro to the public cloud as well as storage, while also moving to SaaS arrangements for Microsoft Office365 and Dynamics CRM.
Cloud Hangs Over Workforce
Enervise’s move to the public cloud coincided with a location change for their Cincinnati headquarters. Enervise has a second office in Columbus, OH, and several remote employees. It seemed like the right time. Unfortunately, the result crippled their workforce and negatively impacted the customer experience. Productivity levels were at an all-time low, morale was down, and shadow IT was starting to gain traction.
The failed solution involved a major global carrier for MPLS connectivity and hosted VoIP. It also included an IT consulting firm that was handling the migration to the public cloud. In the end, the solution was poorly designed and lacked sufficient connectivity levels to handle the workloads.
In addition, storage requirements were significantly underestimated. For Enervise, the amount of data transmitted and storage needed, relative to revenue, is very high compared to other companies of similar size and industries. Public cloud costs were more than double projections… and proliferating. To add insult to injury, the major global carrier was unresponsive to Enervise’s plea for assistance and more bandwidth. Even though bandwidth upgrades were ultimately ordered, the services were never installed, and yet Enervise was getting billed for the upgrades, which only compounded the situation.
As Enervise lie paralyzed and victim of the “spinning wheel,” enter ATC’s co-founder and managing partner, David Goodwin. Goodwin and ATC were recommended to Enervise’s executive V.P. and general manager, Dave Plouffe, by a highly-regarded business advisor.
Goodwin was initially concerned about his ability to assist, given the recent contractual commitment with the major carrier. However, through documentation and persistence, ATC was able to obtain relief for Enervise from the carrier commitment, uncommon by typical telecom standards.
With an acute understanding of Enervise’s workloads and storage requirements, Goodwin, acting as a vCIO, made the recommendation to move—uncharacteristic to his norm and that of today’s IT landscape—back to a premised-based data center environment with higher levels of connectivity. This represented a total “rethink” of Enervise’s infrastructure and would include a transformation of processes for 100+ employees for the second time in less than a year. It had better work.
The Solution: ATC, CBTS, Spectrum & In-House Servers
After soliciting proposals from multiple providers for voice and data services, through consultation with Goodwin and ATC Senior Telecom Consultant, Clayton Connor, Enervise landed on hosted unified communications, SD-WAN and Network as a Service (NaaS) with CBTS.
CBTS’ NaaS solution leverages Cisco’s Meraki technology to include Auto VPN, security, switching, and Wi-Fi, all delivered within the as-a-service model, in addition to CBTS’ Broadsoft-based UCaaS solution, Polycom handsets, and a dedicated fiber circuit in Cincinnati.
Spectrum was used to provide secondary internet circuits at both locations via coax broadband using diverse entrance paths from the dedicated fiber circuits. They were also used to provide a dedicated fiber circuit in Columbus.
A Dell domain controller, Xeon Gold SQL server and a Xeon terminal server were purchased. These servers were installed in Cincinnati on premise. The solution was architected to have redundant power, compute and storage with “screaming” performance capabilities.
The Results
The technology suite recommended by Goodwin and Connor has provided Enervise with a high-performance, fully managed network with management and monitoring. CBTS has advanced the performance of the complete network by connecting multi-location circuitry through a customized, “all-in-one network.”
Enervise invested heavily in the previous solution only to turn to ATC for assistance and recommendations. The result was a 50% reduction in monthly costs, which includes equipment amortization associated with the on-premise data center. Employee productivity and output skyrocketed to unprecedented levels.
“Our current solution is way more economical and lightning fast, which has helped us immensely,” says Plouffe. “ATC’s support has been super… responsive, proactive and specialized to our business and needs. ATC’s project management, procurement and solution implementation was on-schedule, on-budget and, quite frankly, refreshing.”
Immediately, Enervise saw significantly elevated levels of internal and external customer satisfaction. In addition, Enervise remote employees now work anywhere as if they are in the office, while the Columbus location “phones home” in near real time. Enervise no longer faces potential heavy egress charges to get their data back from their public cloud provider since storage is now on premise.
The Enervise workforce is now fully empowered to help clients, facility owners and operators optimize their building energy and operating performance.
