Based in Pompano Beach, FL, Skyemed Pharmacy & Infusion Services, Inc. works with patients and healthcare professionals to offer comprehensive home health services that make successful treatment accessible and affordable. Lacking its own in-house IT expertise, Skyemed hired a small, two-person managed services operation to set up and maintain its network.
For Skyemed, the engagement turned into a hard lesson in the value of choosing the right service provider.
The honeymoon ends early
Soon problems with the old provider began to arise. “They spent a lot of time on us, probably because of all the problems we’d report,” said Ravikumar Baskaran, Skyemed’s Chief Financial Officer. This provider would not explain very much, he said, preferring a hands-off approach. The relationship deteriorated to the point that the provider took down Skyemed’s network by pulling the hard drives from its servers – a potential breach of HIPAA standards for the healthcare service organization.
Still in need of IT services, Skyemed determined that this time around it needed a much larger, more well-rounded managed services provider. A business contact referred them to UDT (UDT).
UDT quickly realized that much remedial work needed to be done.
“When we came on board, the computer room had wires hanging from the ceiling,” recalled Francis Esguerra, Account Manager for UDT. “The other outfit had set them up with some old black-box servers, the OS was not registered correctly, and there was no air conditioning, just a couple of oscillating fans. The data center door was propped open, presenting security issues. And all the equipment was different, just whatever was cheapest. We pulled the thorn out of their paw, basically got them back up and running.”
UDT rebuilt the company’s IT infrastructure from the ground up. To provide reliable disaster recovery capabilities, UDT migrated Skyemed to a hardened Category 5 colocation facility, and deployed a virtualized environment and a storage-attached network. The result: greater resilience of operations, even in the event of lost power or if headquarters were to become inaccessible. UDT pays greater attention to service level agreements (SLAs) and has instituted greater transparency into service tickets.
As the multi-phase deployment continues, UDT has assumed a larger role as managed services provider. UDT personnel are onsite at least two days a week and they continue to unwind problems from the old network, Baskaran said.
To help the company plan for future needs, UDT provided Skyemed with a technology roadmap. Now Skyemed has a scalable solution to accommodate growth and free its staff to focus on business, not technology.
Building relationships on a foundation of trust
Understandably, Skyemed’s experience left it leery of IT “experts,” but UDT soon proved its worthiness. “UDT was far more educational about how our infrastructure was set up and how it needed to be improved,” said Baskaran. “Personality-wise they were far more pleasant and gave us a lot of ideas to improve our infrastructure. UDT almost demanded a close working relationship.”
Esguerra advises companies in need of IT assistance to do their homework. “It’s a challenge we face every day: small companies with one or two guys who pretend to be a huge IT organization,” he said. “They have a beautiful web page, they speak a good game, but when you peel the onion back there’s nothing there, just two guys answering from a phone.” In contrast, UDT invites clients to come tour its network operations center, see trained personnel manning workstations and resolving issues.
Enjoy a 360° relationship with UDT
Skyemed is but one of many organizations that have discovered the advantages of Managed IT as a Service from UDT. Contact us today and let us demonstrate how we can help you reduce the risk, cost and complexity of managing IT solutions.
