Eight years ago, Chris Day founded CDot Networks, a Vancouver-based IT consulting firm. Today, that company is now known as Fully Managed, a name that reflects its evolution of work in the managed services space.
Day, the president and CEO of Fully Managed, said that today nearly all the company’s business is in managed services. In addition to offering full managed services, the company also provides 24/7 monitoring, management, services and support for small and mid-size customers, primarily in B.C.
Fully Managed’s typical customer ranges between 15 to 200 seats, Day said. While most of its customers are companies that are based in B.C., Day said Fully Managed also does work outside of the province and country when other office locations are present.
With several strategic partnerships under its belt with vendors such as Microsoft, Dell and Juniper, Day said the company has had a lot of successes in the cloud computing space, a market that Fully Managed has only been in for a little over a year.
“The right size of companies are highly interested in cloud computing,” Day said. “SMB customers are very quick adopters because they see a quick return on investment. For them, they’re basically getting access to something like (Microsoft) Exchange, in a highly available and resilient cloud-based version so they don’t have to heavily invest in an infrastructure to support it.”
Today, of the 150 or so clients Fully Managed works with, Day said about 75 per cent of them have had conversations about the cloud and the remaining 25 per cent are leveraging cloud computing in their organizations.
“We strive to create piece of mind at Fully Managed,” Day said. “Companies don’t want to worry about this stuff and they want to do more with less, so to outsource to a company like Microsoft and be able to move your infrastructure into their infrastructure creates piece of mind for these clients.”
With its own data centres and a virtualized infrastructure in Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C., Day said Fully Managed also hosts things such as CRM (customer relationship management) and financial applications, which provides customers with greater choice on where their information is stored.
With a growing customer roster and more requests coming in, Day said his 20-person team at Fully Managed will quickly be expanding to help meet the future needs of the business.
“Our clientele is looking for that high quality of service and not just price,” he said. “We’re different because of the way we are. We make sure we know our customers inside and out, and we work at being overly communicative and continually building on our relationships with them.”
Up next for Fully Managed are plans for additional peer-to-peer MSP (managed service providers) partnerships. As a part of HTG (Heartland Technology Group) peer group, a forum for technology-focused resellers, Day said he has the ability to meet with similar IT companies to talk about issues and ask questions to share and learn best practices.
“Locally, we’re trying to formulate relationships in different technology areas such as with a Microsoft Dynamics partner that can do ERP solutions,” Day said. “We’d like to have go-to partners in each area so we can mutually benefit from bringing new customer opportunities to one another.”
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
