IT Services for Multi-Location
The Context For businesses with multiple locations, IT (Information Technology) management is especially difficult, requiring both “big picture” perspective as well as highly responsive and knowledgeable local IT resources.
The Client With offices nationwide, Marx/Okubo counts on a reliable, high performance IT network to support its staff of 88 employees in different offices and in various remote locations.
The Problem A single IT consultant could not respond quickly to problems in other offices or provide the kind of comprehensive IT expertise the firm needed.
The Choice All Covered offered both the geographic breadth and extensive knowledgebase in IT services management and planning that Marx/Okubo sought.
The Results With All Covered’s help, Marx/Okubo has developed a reliable, efficient, and effective multi-location IT network that has helped increase employee productivity and reduce costs.
Manage Your IT Services Across the Country with All Covered, Nationwide IT Services Partner
Case Study: Marx/Okubo
The Context
For small businesses with multiple locations, the task of managing an effective, well integrated IT network can be formidable. Not only must the IT resources at each location be well managed and supported, but IT efforts at all locations must also be tightly coordinated. To do all this requires the abilities to look at how IT can best serve the company’s overall business needs, to oversee the development of IT systems at all locations, and to provide immediate local support when needed. While many IT service options are available to these businesses, nearly all of them lack this combination of capabilities.The Client
Marx/Okubo is a real estate consulting firm that provides services such as owner representation, project management, and construction consulting for commercial and residential facilities throughout the United States. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, its regional offices are located in Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, Southern California, and Hartford, Connecticut. To support employees at these as well as remote sites, it manages a network of 12 servers and more than 88 personal computers, 43 of which are laptops.
The Problem
To handle the IT operation, Marx/Okubo relied on a single consultant working out of its Southern California office. “But, as the company grew,” notes Technical Operations Manager Virginia Romero, “things just became too overwhelming for him, or any one person, to handle. There was a lot of downtime. Hardware was inconsistent. The consultant tried to do a lot of the work remotely. But, when remote support didn’t work, we had to pay to fly him from location to location, which got to be quite expensive.”
The Choice
Believing there had to be a better way, Virginia took a special interest in a marketing brochure she received from another Marx/Okubo employee. It was from All Covered. “The idea of a national IT services company that specialized in supporting businesses our size was a revelation,” Virginia remembers. “We especially liked All Covered’s ability to think about our IT issues company-wide while also being able to send a consultant to any of our sites right away. We also liked the idea of an extensive knowledgebase. If one All Covered consultant couldn’t answer a particular question, another one could.”
Enter All Covered
With efforts coordinated from its Denver office, All Covered immediately began to address the many computing and networking issues Marx/Okubo had. Just a few of the many enhancements include:
- Server installations and upgrades across multiple locations
- Greater hardware and software consistency companywide
- A company-wide managed spam filtering solution
- A firewall for greater security
- A virtual private network (VPN) which not only improves communication between offices but allows full, secure access to company servers from remote locations
In addition, All Covered has helped out in a myriad of other ways. One, for example, is by playing a growing role in Marx/Okubo’s strategic IT planning and procurement efforts. Another is to find imaginative ways to reduce IT costs. For example, All Covered, along with a software development company, worked in partnership to build a central archive in Denver for all seven offices to store client-specific photographs and drawings. All Covered handled the hardware and network requirements. “This has significantly cut our hardware costs,” Virginia notes.
To support these and other efforts, All Covered also delivers All Covered Care, a suite of regularly scheduled services that assure network security and stability and make sure that potential problems are addressed before they become real ones. Marx/Okubo has been using All Covered Care since August 2001.
The Results
For Marx/Okubo, All Covered continues to be a revelation. As Virginia notes: “We chose All Covered initially because we wanted a company with national coverage and an extensive IT knowledgebase. But, the more we work with All Covered, the more confident we’ve become that they will help us make the right choices, pursue the best IT opportunities, reduce costs, and succeed as a company. In fact, we stopped thinking of them as our IT service provider a long time ago. They're our partner—we’re proud to call them that.”
Thinking Nationally, Acting Locally
For small businesses with multiple U.S. locations, choosing an IT services provider usually involves two less-than ideal alternatives. Do they—as Marx/Okubo did—ask one local consultant or firm to support offices all around the nation? Or do they hire different local service providers for each office and run the risk of a fragmented, inefficient system nationwide?
With offices in 18 major metropolitan areas across the U.S., All Covered offers a third—and much more attractive—alternative. Because they are local, All Covered consultants can be on site and on the case quickly. Because the company employs hundreds of consultants nationwide, each client benefits from an extensive IT knowledgebase. And, because All Covered sees each local IT issue in terms of the client’s entire IT operation, it is especially well suited to help the client develop, maintain, and continuously enhance a coherent, tightly integrated, and cost-effective system.
For Marx/Okubo Real Estate Consultants, All Covered Delivers “Seamless Support” to Locations Nationwide.
“We’re a firm with offices in several different regions of the country with the need for strong IT support in each, and the need to tightly coordinate IT activities among them all. With consultants located near all our offices, All Covered is the only IT outsourcing provider we know of that can provide our company with the kind of seamless support we consider essential to a highly-productive network.”
– Virginia Romero, Technical Operations Manager, Marx/Okubo
