Miami Price: S. Florida IT Shop Offers Affordable Managed Services
Even going back to the early 20th century, local developers worked with fervor to bring people and businesses to sunny South Florida.
The pitch was simple: sunshine and tranquility.
The environment was no different in 1994 when IT services firm VirtuWorks was founded in Miami under the name of its parent company, GIS, Inc., which was mainly servicing developers.
The key to the company's rise is the vision of Omar Armenteros, the company's president, having an almost clinical obsession with incorporating the latest business technology and concepts to keep above the competition. Matt Mehler adds 14 years to the equation doubling as both VP and Promotional Czar, and the company's CIO, Otto Ortega, while only with VirtuWorks three years, brings over 15 years of IT experience to the table.
To that end, VirtuWorks counts its technology partners as an integral piece of its expansion and short-term operational needs.
In fact it was in 2005 that VirtuWorks began moving from the hourly service model towards providing flat-rate, Managed IT Services to its customers. In seeking the ability to monitor the health of client networks in real-time, Mehler said many options were considered including taking on technology partners to see the process through and go into managed services full bore.
"Managed services will eventually become transparent as cloud services become more prevalent," Mehler predicts. "Currently, most MSPs charge their customers per user, PC or server for monitoring, maintenance and support. In the Cloud, Managed IT Support is rolled into the cost of services like virtual desktops, hosted applications and hosted storage."
Mehler's assertions match larger industry forecasts which foresee an environment where cloud service providers own the hardware infrastructure on which they deliver services and integrate support into their service offerings.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on August 16, 2010