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Hand over IT woes to someone else? Not bad idea

Posted on: Monday, 11 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

CCD/Vynamics offers 'hosted desktop' for small-, mid-size firms

Jonathan C. Smith, left, chairman and chief executive of CCD/ Vynamics, and Jack Nugent, president and chief operating officer, stand guard over their customers' remote network servers. "We manage their whole network on the Internet, and they can access it anywhere in the world. It's always up to date, and it's less expensive because maintaining networks is our core competency," Smith said.

BOULDER - Picture life without an information technology department, or any IT personnel, for that matter.

Servers and data integration? Somebody else's headache. Virus protection and network security? No problem. Data archiving, retrieval and disaster recovery? Foouurgitaboutit!

And while this might seem a Twilight Zone return to the good ole 1950s, one Boulder firm believes it may be the dawn of a brand new era for small- to mid-size businesses: High-end network capability without the headaches and IT personnel.

Made possible by today's Internet connectivity, CCD/Vynamics of Boulder now is offering a service called "hosted desktop," which essentially means that all your desktops, or laptops for that matter, feed into a network hosted, maintained and serviced by CCD. On hosted computers, the desktop display looks just like a Microsoft desktop but updates files over the Internet connection.

"Initially, business owners might think it's expensive, but by the time they add it all up there can be substantial savings," said Jonathan Smith, president and founder of CCD/Vynamics of Boulder. "We manage their whole network on the Internet, and they can access it anywhere in the world. It's always up to date, and it's less expensive because maintaining networks is our core competency."

CCD may be among just a handful of companies nationally that are very far down the road in offering this service, based on Microsoft Terminal Exchange products.

"There are quite a few companies doing hosted Terminal Exchange, but only a handful doing hosted desktop," Smith said. Microsoft offers packages for hosted desktop - also called application service provider, or ASP, services - but CCD has created its own software to offer other applications, such as Timberline Accounting, Precision Software, QuickBooks and most any PC applications a company wants to run.

CCD, a Microsoft Gold Partner in security, hosts its networks at InFlo's highly secure and redundant facility in Denver. So far, CCD is hosting about 12 companies, or 750 users, in the hosted desktop program.

One highly satisfied company is Rhodes Construction of Fort Collins, which is saving (conservatively estimated) about 38 percent on its IT costs, said President Mark Baldwin.

"We have, for a number of years, been managing our own local area network. We had three dedicated servers in house," said the president of the 62-year-old firm. "It got so extensive with the project, that I was going to have to hire a full-time IT person, or change my job description."

Outsourced service plan

Rhodes, a general contracting outfit, has about 40 full-time employees, but the number of people accessing some part of its networks is many times that when subcontractors, designers and architects are taken into account.

Baldwin said between himself and the chief financial officer there was usually four days of work a week on the LAN, which meant they couldn't concentrate on running their organization as effectively.

"I'm extremely happy we went outsourced," he said. "We would have had the additional salary of the IT person, and there's nobody that could have been hired who would have been as competent and qualified as these people, who deal with it every day."

CCD, Baldwin said, was clearly above its outsourcing competition in creating a service plan for the installation and training phase of the solution.

"These people understood what process management and project management really meant," he said. "Of course, we do this everyday with hundreds of contractors and subcontractors on a project."

In the end, Baldwin said, the hosted desktop solution looks exactly like his desktop used to appear, except that he can access that desktop and update company information from virtually anywhere. Today, Rhodes Construction also is testing the wireless capability that CCD brings to market, which may save the construction company even more headaches with running landlines to remote construction sites.

CCD is a 7-year-old company with 15 employees who are focused on network solutions for small- to mid-size companies in the area, Smith said.

In fact, it was those customers, who usually faced major updates every three years that might run to $50,000, who first led him down this trail.

Through a contractual agreement with Microsoft, CCD holds and updates the software and licenses for Microsoft software, which means that everything is periodically updated.

Andy Finney, who heads business development at CCD, estimated that most small companies going to a hosted desktop solution could pay as little as $94/month for each desktop user, provided that CCD was only supporting Microsoft products. That might seem steep on the outset, he said, but most companies that fully explore their IT costs will find they pay much more, he said.

Network dependablity

The solution seems to make the most sense for a company in the 10- to 100-employee range that uses primarily Microsoft products, but is already behind the curve in updating its software and its network. Macintosh products are not yet supported and graphically intense work-places also might prove problematic, depending on Internet access.

But dependability from the CCD side is one reason that Baldwin has recommended the solution to many of his business associates and also to the association of general contractors.

"We haven't been down one day because of CCD, and they always notify us well in advance when they are updating something. They always do that at night when our people don't need the network," Baldwin said. "Since we've been with them (18 months) we've had two days when things went down, but that was our Internet connectivity, and it didn't have anything to do with CCD."

See if your own network has that kind of dependability.

JEFF THOMAS

Business Report Correspondent

Copyright The Boulder County Business Report Jul 25-Aug 7, 2003

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