A Unifying Solution

The solution provider, founded in 1995, is moving from a traditional VAR break-and-fix model to offer managed services, and as it takes on new projects, it is experiencing a few growing pains.

When the company was hired by Secure Care Product—a small business that manufactures security devices for hospitals and nursing homes—to migrate its operating system and e-mail platform, the solution provider happily took the job.

However, IT Guardian had no experience migrating clients from Microsoft Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, since about half of its customers are small businesses that typically don’t use Exchange.

The solution provider enlisted the help of managed service provider Do IT Smarter, in San Diego, which was able to coach IT Guardian through the migration process so it could deliver the perfect solution Secure Care needed.

For Secure Care, a Concord, N.H.-based maker of electronic bracelets designed to prevent kidnapping in hospital maternity wards and to keep patients with Alzheimer’s disease from wandering off, proximity was key in choosing a solution provider.

Secure Care IS Manager Mike Rucker’s first big IT project of 2006 would be to migrate Secure Care from Microsoft Windows NT to Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory and to migrate the company’s Exchange servers.

Rucker had one problem. Although Secure Care employs about 65 people, he was the company’s only IT staffer. And since Rucker couldn’t devote the time necessary to learn how to do the migrations, he needed to hire an expert.

“It was a huge project and I wanted to get it off my back. I do a lot of things here, but I don’t plan on doing Exchange Active Directory upgrades for the rest of my life. I wanted someone who knew how to do it to come in and get it done for me,” Rucker said.

When Rucker received a fax from IT Guardian announcing a risk-assessment seminar in the area, he decided to attend. He then hired IT Guardian for the job. IT Guardian, in turn, enlisted Do IT Smarter to walk it through the migration.

Do IT Smarter itself made the transition from traditional VAR to MSP in 2000 and offers its expertise to fellow VARs making the same transition. It also assists VARs that have taken on other projects with which they may not have experience.

“It started off with an Active Directory upgrade from NT to Windows Server 2003, which IT Guardian performed. Once that was in place, we connected up with Do IT Smarter, who remotely connected and configured [the system and] prepared the old Exchange box for the introduction of Exchange 2003,” said Mike Fronzaglia, network engineer at IT Guardian.

Do IT Smarter installed and configured the bridge to grab all the incoming e-mail on the new Exchange 2003 server.

After IT Guardian completed the steps on Microsoft’s checklist for migrations from Exchange 5.5 to 2003, Do IT Smarter disconnected, and IT Guardian migrated the mailboxes. After 24 hours, Do IT Smarter remotely connected to the system again and performed final testing.

“I can honestly say this is one of the few projects that really went smoothly from start to finish. It was seamless,” Fronzaglia said.

Calling in an experienced third party helped IT Guardian win Secure Care’s business.

“We don’t have any Exchange experience, or very limited, and it’s something we wouldn’t want to do all by ourselves and have it blow up in our face,” said IT Guardian President Tom Stefanik.

“We called up Do IT Smarter and told them what we were doing. They told us what we would need to do to prepare for it. They helped us out over the phone, and then they got on remotely and did some of the stuff that we weren’t sure of.

Basically, it was a job we couldn’t have done by ourselves,” Stefanik said.

The experience also added depth to IT Guardian’s evolving business as it transforms itself from a break-and-fix IT shop into an MSP and begins to target larger customers.

“From never having been in the Exchange environment because of the size of the customers that we typically deal with, to actually getting to see it first hand, was very beneficial to me,” Fronzaglia said. “I’d probably need to see it done one more time and then I’d feel fairly comfortable going in and doing it myself.”

Secure Care’s Rucker said working with IT Guardian was a positive experience. “It went wonderfully. They did the analysis of all the work to determine the scope of the work. We had to do it in a couple of different phases because there was some old equipment here that I was taking out of service, but I couldn’t do it all at once because I had to do my own work here,” Rucker said.

“They were very good to work with. When I had questions, they were very responsive. I kept out of the way when I had my thing to do, and they were here in a very timely fashion,” he said.

The solution provider is now pitching another project to the customer.

“They’re quoting something right now for me,” Rucker said. “We have three Web servers here, and one of them runs the Exchange and two others run our [Web-based] CRM product. Right now we use that internally. People can’t log in if they don’t have a login name and password. But I want to eliminate that one last piece [in the upgrade by securing Web-based access].”

With the Exchange migration successfully under its belt, IT Guardian is now proactively targeting health-care and financial customers.

“We are actually in the middle of a vertical market campaign, and we are targeting vertical markets that are under compliance restrictions, primarily the banking industry and the health-care industry,” said Stephen French, account executive at IT Guardian. “We provide a network monitoring system that can generate the reports necessary to satisfy federal compliance issues.”

About 20 percent of IT Guardian’s revenue comes from its managed services business, and its president has no regrets about calling in another company to help win business.

“With Do IT Smarter, we not only got the job, but we have a happy customer,” Stefanik said.