iT1
Providing an Unbiased Approach for Cloud Deployment

As industry veterans holding rich experience in business development, Bryan Clifton and Guy Steinbrink, while founding iT1 in 2003, believe that the #1 goal in building a successful business is hiring and maintaining valuable employees. With happy, vested employees one has a much better opportunity to achieve customer satisfaction goals. So the founders vowed to engage themselves in not only running the business but also to involve themselves in processes such as marketing and hiring as well. iT1 helps businesses to determine the right technology stacks and platforms for any given application, workload, or environment. Today, the company brings to the table, technology experts with a powerful background in both cloud and on-premise solutions.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Guy Steinbrink, founder and principal of iT1 shares his company’s strategy and solutions in providing value-driven service.

Please give us a brief overview of iT1.

iT1 has been a global technology solution provider for 15 years. We have always created an intellectual and creative environment for our teams, and this has, in turn, resulted in driving the company and its clients toward optimum success.

We started with a goal to work with enterprise accounts from the transactional level to the service and support level. So, IT1 has set up systems to work with the largest customers and be equally scalable and flexible enough to serve SMB customers as well. Currently, we exhibit the ability to work in a multimillion-dollar environment for transactions, service, and support.

As a value-added reseller, we have built a team of experts and general information technology leaders to provide best-of-breed solutions. We achieve this through our four pillars—namely cloud solutions, infrastructure, security, collaboration/communication—which can be deployed on-premise, off premise, and as managed services models. Our value-added solutions enable customers to realize increased user adoption, create efficiency, and achieve cost savings. As a $125 million business with 125 employees, we combine agile processes, right-size program management, and leading information technologies to deliver results to the customers.

What are the challenges that companies face today in the cloud space?

We recognized early on that the true value of the cloud can only be realized when customers can break away from the natural idiosyncrasies of on-premise environments. For the economic model of public clouds to make sense for customers, iT1 works with customers to take advantage of performance-enhancing and cost-saving services only possible in the cloud.

We are helping customers transform their application and database architectures to modernize operations and build a stable platform for future growth and development. Additionally, before moving ahead with the transformation, organizations should understand their environment completely, and assess whether moving to the cloud would be feasible for them without significant re-architecture. The goal should be to migrate applications and architecture with a plan that clearly articulates what value will be returned to the business and a detailed analysis of costs and anticipated ROI. So, with our team of experts, we assist our customers in evaluating and making favorable, informed decisions.

Please walk us through iT1’s Cloud Solutions on the basis of its features and benefits involved.

About a decade ago, customers were investing in the first wave of virtualization looking to consolidate the physical appliances in their datacenter to improve resource utilization, save on costly infrastructure investments or space, power, and cooling in that datacenter. Today, the customers that want to leverage the cloud for capacity on demand and business continuity are looking for ways to operationalize their infrastructure management. This can mean having virtual machine images packaged for cloud-ready deployment, and should target management via a single control pane to orchestrate delivery for mission-critical workloads. iT1 helps its customers deploy this software-defined infrastructure in ways that bring immediate efficiency and resiliency benefits to on-premise environments and iT1 can offer cloud-native integrations for those organizations which are ready to take the next steps.

Is there any step by step methodology or a process that iT1 has in place to help their clients go up and running with cutting-edge cloud technologies?

The course of action begins with listening to the customers, understanding their needs, and accordingly, providing thought leadership. We follow this process as individuals or specific teams alone may not be positioned to modernize the client’s IT environment, for a cloud migration and many need some form of education or guidance first. iT1 has a defined consultative process through which we engage with the customers, understand their specific needs and objectives, and determine if moving to the cloud will be efficient for them in terms of investments and business outcomes.

Once we have completed that preliminary phase, we recommend a cloud-readiness assessment that is run on the customer’s environment. This assessment gives a clear picture of the relatively suitability for cloud deployment of a given application or environment, and the costs incurred by doing so. By taking a detailed approach that incorporates the objectives of the business, the desired end-state, and an assessment of the current landscape, we are able to offer customers a detailed roadmap for moving their infrastructure into a managed environment, and the value they can expect to return to the business.

What does the future hold for iT1? Any footprint expansion plans or any new solutions that you are coming up with?

The future looks brighter for iT1 as we have made significant investments in terms of money, time, tools, and resources to enhance support with leading cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google as well as point solutions.

Being a company that fuels customer experience, iT1 is planning to further focus on expertise in the areas, which the customers would need in the future. Topping this list is security; as it is the paramount factor in many CIOs’ minds today—particularly those products and services that enable Zero Trust Architecture for private, public, and hybrid cloud architectures. Further, the management and analysis of large and diverse data sets will also be a prime focus, especially with the wide adoption of IoT technology. To this end, iT1 will help customers to uncover and extract intelligence and relevant data such that they can plan for the future confidently.