Edition 11 | December 2011
Welcome to the 11th edition of Quip Notes, the newsletter presented to you by Compuquip!
To download a printable version of the newsletter, click Quip Notes December 2011
CEO’s CORNER:
On September 30th, we completed our thirty first year in business with exceptional results. Our managed services grew 16% even after the closing of several bank clients by government regulators, Blue Wave Communications doubled its revenues for the year with significant projects at the University of Miami, BankUnited and recabling the entire Miami Childrens Hospital campus and our security practice continued to expand their service capabilities to meet our growing demands. Another good sign for our economy, is that we grew our employee count by 17%, adding personnel in all areas.
During this past year, we continued to develop our newest company, BrightGauge Software. Brian Dosal and his development team in San Francisco have completed our “beta testing” with over twenty companies participating. BGS offers a reporting tool for managed services providers, please take a look at www.brightgauge.com. The “kick-off” took place at IT Nation in Orlando and we are extremely hopeful of its success not only in the United States but globally.
I am very fortunate to have received two great honors earlier this year. The first, being inducted into the Miami Dade College Hall of Fame, thanks go to Dr. Eduardo Padron for this tremendous privilege. The second, is being named First Vice Chairman of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce with responsibility for the Economic Summit on January 13th. I also have the great honor to become Chairman of the Chamber in June 2013.
As always, our clients’ success has been and will always be our only focus and we look forward to growing with you. Our door is always open and we welcome you to let us know how we can help!
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Left My Laptop In Miami
By: Eric Dosal
Last October, I was traveling to San Francisco to help my brother move our new software company, BrightGauge Software, into its new office space.
I did my normal routine the morning before my flight and prepared everything to go (I have a pre-travel checklist which tends to get mocked by others). The last thing I had to do was send out an email, say goodbye to my wife and head out the door. Which I did, with perfect execution, with one slight misstep, I didn’t pack my laptop…
Funny thing is I didn’t realize it until I got to security, right as I’m emptying my pockets and ready to go through the scanner I open my laptop bag only to realize my laptop is not there. The initial reaction panic, “what am I going to do?” That was followed by an urge to head home to grab my laptop, but there was no time, then it hit me:
“What can I do on my laptop that I can’t do on my iPad?”
I scanned my to do list for the trip (on my iPhone) and realized the answer was ‘nothing’. All my documents are synced with my iPad so I could get my work done, my music and magazines are on my iPad, my books I read via Kindle which I read on my iPad or iPhone.
The only thing I figured I couldn’t do is a ton of heavy typing; I had wanted to write a few blog posts while in flight. But here I am flying at 36,000 feet some where over the Gulf of Mexico typing this post on my iPad.
I guess my point is, first of all I better check for my laptop before I leave the house again, and secondly how awesome it is to leverage technology in such a way that I can go several days without a laptop and only my iPad. These are the apps that made it possible with a brief explanation of how I personally use each:
- DropBox – file sharing and document back up (only non-confidential documents)
- Skype – video conferencing and instant messenger
- Notes – to write out my blog posts and notes
- SharePlus – secure access to our internal SharePoint site
- Kindle – all my books
- InstaPaper – blogs and news articles saved to read later
- iTunes – music and movies
Full Disclosure: I must confess, my Exec Admin shipped my laptop overnight to me so that I would have it the following morning, special thanks to Pilar for helping me out.
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The Compuquip Cloud Back-up Solution 1 Year Later
By: Jorge Azcuy
About a year ago (September 15th, 2010 to be exact), I blogged about the new Compuquip Cloud Backup solution we were offering to our clients. A few months later I then blogged again to give a short update on how this new solution was working out for Compuquip and our customers. One year later, I am happy to report that the Compuquip Cloud Backup solution had been a resounding success.
Today, we have a dozen customers (Compuquip included – we ate our own dog food on this one as Customer #1) backing up over 12TB of data to the Compuquip Cloud. This data, which after compression and de-duplication sits at just under 6TB (not bad considering this includes a year of retention in some cases!), is then copied to a second secure datacenter managed by our partners at i365 for a redundant copy.
Back in January, we added a more robust reporting capability to this solution, and here are some of the numbers I’m excited to share with you:
- In the last 9 months, we’ve run a total of 21,169 backup jobs. This includes backups across all customers by frequency (hourly, nightly, etc) and by type (file backup, database, mailbox, etc.).
- Out of those 21,169 backups, we’ve had 51 failures. An eye-opening success rate of 99.76%
- More importantly, during this time there have been 65 restore jobs; some as part of our proactive testing for our customers and others actual restores which were requested. The restore jobs so far have been 100% successful.
Our customers (and our Engineers) really appreciate how easy the setup has been – no hardware, no hassle, and No Tapes! As an added bonus, since the monthly fees are based on the amount of data being stored in the cloud, some of our customers have taken the opportunity to get rid of some older junk that was needlessly taking up space on their servers.
Special thanks to our partners at i365 and to my team at Compuquip, especially Hector Alcantara and Peter Cook for making this success and providing a valuable service to our customers.
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Why everyone loves our Virtual CIOs
By: Eric Dosal
For the clients that are used to the “old support model” of time & material reactive support and onsite support, the virtual CIO is their “IT guy”. You know…the guy they call when something breaks.
For our clients that want to maximize their IT investment and be proactive to find ways to leverage technology, they love to have the Virtual CIO to bounce ideas off of and to help develop strategic IT plans.
For us internally the virtual CIO is our ‘quality assurance’ person that keeps an independent eye on our service for their clients. They are putting together reports for the clients and reviewing trends and following up with our other teams.
So what is the true role of the virtual CIO? To be honest it’s a little bit of everything above. Up until about 3 years ago we didn’t have dedicated virtual CIOs or Technical Account Managers within our service team. And very quickly it became apparent that it was a huge hole we needed to fill. So we initially took two of our top guys and converted them into the position and said stop billing and start focusing on the network performance and client experience.
It took a while for our team to adapt but now we have a team of 3 ½ team members that are 100% dedicated to providing the virtual CIO services. They are regularly meeting with our clients to understand their business challenges and develop solutions to address them and to be the sounding board for our clients from an IT perspective. Most of them sit on the IT Steering Committee of our clients and actively participate in the meeting.
We are very happy with Jorge, Steve, Mike and Jose who do a great job managing our clients!
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Employee Spotlight:
Lin-Dai Quant, Service Desk Manager
Lin-Dai Quant joined Compuquip as a support team member in 2008, but has worked with Compuquip since 2002 with a previous employer that was a Compuquip client. Lin-Dai’s career with Compuquip has always been working with the support team: fielding calls, dispatching technicians, scheduling, and coordinating with contractors. Over time, she has transitioned into the Service Desk Manager role, which is a vital role in the continued success of the support team. Some of her responsibilities as the Service Desk Manager are to serve as an escalation point for client liaisons, monitoring help desk metrics and overall administration of the help desk so that it’s always great.
When Lin- Dai was asked, “How do you improve the business of Compuquip’s clients? She stated, “By providing the best client service experience for each user I interact with”. What does Lin like about working at Compuquip? She stated, “Everyday is a challenge and the great people I get to work with”
Lin-Dai holds a Bachelor’s of Business Administration from FIU. She also holds a Help Desk Analyst Certification and Help Desk Customer Support Specialist Certification from HDI.
Getting to know Lin-Dai: Lin-Dai loves to travel, is a Make-A-Wish Volunteer, a Certified SCUBA diver and is training for her first half marathon.
When she’s not improving client experiences, volunteering her time, training for a half marathon and SCUBA diving, she’s spends time with her boyfriend and four sisters’. She also hopes to own a boat one day.
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Compuquip On The Move
Did you know Compuquip is moving? The new Compuquip Headquarters will be located at 8400 NW 33rd Terrace, Doral, Florida. Our tentative move date is January 20th, 2012. We’re documenting the build out process of our new headquarters by taking fun photos and awesome videos. You can visit the Compuquip Facebook page to view those photo albums and videos. Let’s stay connected!
