Transcript
Keith Cruthirds: The backbone of our business is our IT infrastructure. And we’re a global business. We need to make sure that our environment is protected and that it’s up and running 24 hours a day.
In our due diligence process, we were asking existing Aldridge customers, “Tell us about your experience.” Everybody that we talked to had been with Aldridge for multiple years. Well, you don’t stay with somebody for multiple years unless you’re happy with their services.
Aldridge is proactive. They don’t stand by and let things happen, they act, they prevent—and in the IT world, that’s important. A couple of weeks ago, I came in in the morning. I usually get into the office pretty early. My controller was here and she said, “Hey, the server’s down.” Before I had the opportunity to put my briefcase down and pick up the phone, the tech was at the door saying, “Hey, we recognize the fact that your server went down this morning and I’m here to restart it.” Problem solved.
Having the CIO is important to us because having somebody that has the knowledge and experience to build our network and maintain our network and make recommendations on improvements to our network as we go forward is really important to us. We feel like we’re getting extremely good value for the dollars that we’re spending with Aldridge. Because we have not only the help desk that’s available to us. But, you know, should something catastrophic happen, we’ve got that army of IT specialists that can hit the door and make things happen for us.
Nick Mair: If we had our own guy in here and we were wanting to buy a server, what would we do? We’d probably go online and start looking for servers and then we’d have to call a company like Aldridge to find out [if this] is the right server. Or is this too big? Too small? Too expensive? That one person wouldn’t have enough experience. So, I think that using a third-party company to be your partner is a lot less expensive long-term than employing someone full-time.
It seems that every time you send your ticket in or you call, there’s always somebody there available and every ticket gets closed pretty quickly. The speed [at] which Aldridge takes care of the problem is definitely one of the advantages and it’s definitely made my life easy.
Aldridge understands that when something isn’t working or there’s a problem, it needs to get fixed. They understand what we need, and I think that’s the key to why Aldridge [is] successful. From our first inception with them, our first meeting, all the way through, everything was very professional. Both companies understand each other, and both are very open, honest companies, and I think that makes a difference.
And Aldridge was very good at the beginning as to really, really, truly wanting to understand our company and what our expectations were. Got the feeling was—these guys know their game, they know their stuff, they understand us now and they’re going to take care of us.
Keith: The reason we came to Aldridge was because our existing IT company let us down. An email was sent to one of our employees that clicked on it and it was a ransomware attack. The protection that we had in place was not sufficient, so they took over our server. We also found out that the backups on our servers weren’t happening. I viewed that as a complete let down.
Nick: They’re getting more and more sophisticated, which meant that our IT needed to get more and more sophisticated.
Keith: Subsequent to going with Aldridge, we haven’t had those issues.
Nick: I’m a big supporter of Aldridge, for sure. I truly mean it. I think that Aldridge [is] a great company, a great support company. I’m 100 percent sure that we brought the right company on board with us.
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