CMIT Chicago Keeps it in the Neighborhood with Green IT
Name: CMIT Solutions of Downtown Chicago
Services offered: Proactive IT support, backup and disaster recovery, security solutions, and more
Website: www.cmitsolutions.com/chicago-dt
“We constantly look for ways to help our customers conserve energy and reduce waste. Symform helps us do that and makes my life easier.”
In business since 2008, CMIT Solutions of Chicago Downtown is part of CMIT Solutions, a network of independently-owned IT service providers spanning 120 locations across the U.S. The Chicago Downtown chapter provides comprehensive managed services to professional service firms and other small businesses, most of which are within close range of the company headquarters.
“We focus on clients we can reach on foot, by bicycle, or on public transportation,” says Jeremy Treister, the firm’s president. That spares technicians from driving around town all day, which is easier on them and healthier for the bottom line. It also dovetails nicely with the company’s commitment to sustainable IT.
“It’s part of our identity as a business,” Treister says. “We constantly look for ways to help our customers conserve energy and reduce waste, and we try to reduce our own environmental impact too. It’s a differentiator that our clients really appreciate.”
The Challenge
Treister’s customers rely on him to safeguard their customer files, financial records, and other vital data. But until recently, the remote backup solution he was using made meeting that responsibility a challenge. “We were constantly getting error messages,” Treister recalls. “My team spent hours every week troubleshooting problems. Worse yet, it was time we couldn’t bill our customers for, so it came directly out of profits.”
Treister began searching for a simpler, more dependable solution. Finding the right one proved difficult, however. Some of the products he evaluated were consumer services unsuitable for small business. Others were business-grade systems that were prohibitively expensive. And still others either used up more Internet bandwidth than his clients could spare or required frequent manual software updates.
“We couldn’t seem to find anything with the combination of functionality, price point, and ease of management we were looking for,” Treister says.
The Solution
Then late in 2010, Treister heard about the Symform Cloud Storage Network. It wasn’t long before he knew he’d found the right solution for his needs.
“We put it on our internal server and the process of it getting up and running was really easy,” Treister says. Learning to use the system was easy too, he adds, thanks to Symform’s no-nonsense, video-based training materials and intuitive interface. “It makes it really simple to see all of your sites, generate detailed reports, and check on billing status,” he notes.
Symform makes setting prices a snap too. With Treister’s previous backup solution, pricing was based on how much storage space he used. As a result, his team wasted hours every month calculating each client’s disk consumption, adjusting their fees accordingly, and then fielding calls from irritated business owners wondering why their backup costs kept changing. Under the Symform pricing model that Treister chose, however, he pays a flat per-machine, per-month fee for unlimited data. “That enables us to charge our customers a flat, unlimited rate too, which is easier for them to understand and easier for us to manage,” Treister observes.
Symform’s revolutionary distributed cloud-based architecture even fits in with the emphasis on green computing at CMIT Solutions of Chicago Downtown. “It basically makes productive use of infrastructure resources that would otherwise go to waste, and since everything is distributed there’s no central data center to power and cool,” Treister notes. Plus, he continues, Symform uses AES-256 encryption and disperses data in fragments across the storage cloud, so it’s completely secure.
The Results
With Symform’s help, Treister’s customers are finally getting reliable data protection at steady, affordable rates, which is good news for them and CMIT Solutions of Chicago Downtown alike. “We’re probably saving a half a day a month that we used to spend re-calculating our clients’ storage-based backup fees,” Treister says. Furthermore, his technicians no longer have to waste valuable time fixing backup-related technical problems. “We almost never have to touch the servers Symform protects for us,” Treister reports. “Backups just work the way they’re supposed to, and any software updates happen automatically behind the scenes.”
All of those time savings are helping Treister keep profits strong even though he’s actually charging most of his customers less for backup services than before switching to Symform. “My prices are lower but my profit margins have pretty much stayed the same,” he says. “What’s really the best part, though, is how much less frustration I deal with these days. Symform just makes my life easier.”