Finding its way, for the first time, on the Top 100 Solution Providers list is InfoStream Technologies Inc. of Richmond Hill, Ont. Placing 14th with revenues between $80 and $90 million looks like a good start for the company that describes itself as a mission critical solutions provider.
But
Infostream is not an overnight success story. Its recent success can be attributed to a change in philosophy during the Y2K/ dot-com bubble years.
Infostream decided to become the type of business partner that would focus on a few areas well such as IP communications, high availability clustering, disaster recovery, server consolidation and operational support, instead of being a one stop shop for everything.
Peter Stavropoulos, company spokesperson said Infostream differentiates itself from the competition by providing mission critical solutions through an agnostic best-of-breed approach from architecture to operational support of the solutions it builds.
“”Five years ago, we developed a strategy to break free from the product supply and single vendor focus to more of a technology approach,”” Stavropoulos said.
While the multi-solution approach has won over many customers it still poses a challenge for Infostream. According to Stavropoulos, vendors still want the solution provider to resell end-to-end solutions and customers are still interested in a one-company solution.
“”Our competition is our partners and our vendors most of the time,”” he said.
As for future plans, Stavropoulos did not want to divulge any citing competitive issues. However, he did says Infostream wants to continue this open, multi-solution strategy going forward.
The strategy has seen the company experienced a 35 per cent year-over-year growth rate in a sluggish IT economy and overall recession.
Besides revenue growth, the company has formed strategic partnerships with Avaya Canada, Brocade Communications, Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, EMC Canada, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Canada, Lucent Canada, McData, Microsoft Canada, Network Appliance, Oracle Canada, RSA Security, and Sun Microsystems and Veritas Canada.
“”Customers are seeking partners and integrators to provide solutions based on best-of-breed products and integration with existing infrastructures versus the rip and replace strategies of the past,”” Stavropoulous said.