Daymark Solutions

Vendors see the benefits, too. “I look for partners who can lower our cost of sales,” said Brian Murphy, channel partner manager for EMC, Boston. “With their great sales folks and great technical folks, they can do that. And their execution is excellent.”

Daymark Solutions fueled its growth by launching a highly successful backup and recovery service and beefing up its integration offering. Clearly, the three-year-old company, with fewer than 10 employees, has demonstrated the nimbleness typical of most small companies.

But Daymark’s operational agility isn’t just a factor of size—or lack of it. This little-company-that-could also governs itself with the same techniques that distinguish the largest and best systems integrators. “Every [employee] has quarterly management-by-objectives,” said Brian Casey, general manager of Daymark, Billerica, Mass.

Those objectives may be related to receiving specific certifications, being published or earning a high level of customer satisfaction, Casey said. Those individual objectives then feed into the company’s goals for revenue, cost containment and customer satisfaction, for example. Most striking of all: Each consultant also handles strategic relationships for Daymark—participating in vendors’ sales and service efforts while interacting closely with vendors’ field-level tech teams.

“We serve two purposes with this,” Casey said. “It gives the consultants something meaty to really sink their teeth into—getting them more involved

in the service side. And it makes them more tightly aligned with the delivery personnel, so they know where to turn and how to navigate through massive companies like IBM and EMC. Our consultants drive those important relationships, and that feeds back into financial results.”

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With its 3,000-square-foot integration facility, Daymark also thinks big and acts accordingly. There, Daymark receives all those “moving parts,” then assembles, configures and tests them before sending them on to the customer.

“In this business, Murphy shows up everywhere. Cables are too short.

The software version isn’t right. There’s always something,” Casey said. “If we can take that out of the equation by staging it in our facility, it makes for a smoother process and a better ability to coordinate schedules with other contractors.”