For the second straight year, ATC is the proud sponsor of this year’s feature spotlight, “10 IT Tech Firms to Watch in 2017.” (See last year’s spotlight here.) The article will appear in the Winter issue of LEAD Magazine, which will soon hit the streets.
This year, the concept for the feature took a slightly different slant, focusing on “10 IT Tech Firms” rather than “10 IT Service Firms.” This opened the door for new, additional firms to be recognized that serve at a high level within the space. We also asked each firm to talk about What’s NEXT-GEN in Their World.
Here’s a sneak peek at 3 of this year’s 6 newbies and their view of Next-Gen IT
1) Immedion (www.immedion.com)
(pictured above on left: Ben Baker, Senior Account Executive, and Chris Stuttler, Senior Director of Operations)
As cloud adoption continues to grow, enterprise-class organizations are seeking NEXT-GEN cloud solutions that are easy to use, yet secure, flexible and performance-guaranteed. Recognizing the need for more control and easier cloud infrastructure management, Immedion’s cloud allows administrators to provide business unit segregation and management, security control and a re-source-usage module from a single interface. NEXT-GEN cloud solutions must also allow for virtual machines and applications to be seamlessly migrated, without the need to rebuild or modify the current running configurations. Greater efficiency in resource management, seamless migrations, and performance guarantees mean IT departments can focus on adding business value rather than managing their cloud infrastructure.
“We’re a lot more than just a typical cloud provider. We offer in-depth support and guidance for our customers. We blend on-site, hands-on support with a full MSP practice surrounding our cloud offering,” says Chris Stuttler. We’re that trusted IT vendor organizations need to manage the entire process to get them to the cloud and then manage those systems that remain on-site, and manage the customer base so they have access and can function within the cloud applications. We have many customers for whom we manage a blend of services both on-site and in the cloud.”
Additionally, enterprise organizations look to the cloud for simplified disaster recovery solutions to meet compliance requirements with no additional overhead. The Immedion Recovery Cloud provides industry-leading recovery point and recovery time objectives from a simplified, fully managed disaster recovery suite. Cloud-based DR makes failover testing easy so customers can rest easy knowing their DR solution will work when they need it most.
2) Expedient Technology Solutions (www.expedienttechnology.com)
(pictured above in middle: Marcus Thompson, CEO, and David Stone, Director of IT)
Security concerns are increasingly an issue for small and medium-size businesses. They typically have fewer resources available to monitor and combat cyber threats, which makes them easy targets for hackers and other opportunists. Many of these also are required to comply with regulations – such as PCI or HIPAA – and don’t know how to get started. For clients of Expedient Technology Solutions (ETS), optimization of cloud strategies provides opportunities to manage, share and control their data.
As compliance drives adoption of NEXT-GEN security tools for SMBs, Expedient’s powerful collaboration of managed and controlled services help clients become NEXT-GEN by assisting with daily operations while keeping all team members and mobile users functional and effective during their day. ETS provides a broad range of expertise to design, deploy and manage clients’ networks and critical business systems with “Stress-Free IT,” delivering vital technical support.
“It comes down to how responsive we are, how easy we are to do business with because of the knowledge we bring to the table,” says Marcus Thompson. “We bring the enterprise level – NEXT-GEN cloud services – to smaller businesses at a price they can afford. We give mobile users the tools to make sure they and their data can work remotely, and securely, from anywhere at any time. ETS offers that special set of tools to make sure they and their data are properly protected.”
3) RoundTower Technologies (www.roundtower.com)
(pictured above on right: Kurtis Lindeman, CIO/CTO, and Andrew Gallimore, Practice Manager for ServiceNow)
In the heightened age of security breaches of various size and forms, security operations are at the peak of every company’s mind. RoundTower leverages its experience in security and its partnership with ServiceNow to offer a NEXT-GEN enterprise platform for not just customer service management (CSM), but also security operations management, service mapping and orchestration. ServiceNow is best known as a premier IT service management application. However, now with RoundTower, it serves as a NEXT-GEN business transformation tool through these new capabilities.
“It’s the only platform that gives a holistic approach, an end-to-end enterprise view, making security actionable by bringing visibility to a breach. Companies quickly get out of panic mode and into action plans and task management, which can tie into the company CMDB and business service mapping,” says Andrew Gallimore. “The platform is so exciting that I actually changed my career path for it, so it’s a pretty powerful tool.”
ServiceNow offers an automated capability to map business services, helping companies move away from tribal knowledge management and into an age of real-time network views. These capabilities combined with RoundTower’s integrated portfolio of solutions tie into key cloud platforms like VMware, AWS and Azure for orchestration and automation of environments.
