Interview with Doug Jessop, Jessop & Company

Situation
"A businessman knows that effective IT is an essential component to running a company, but maintaining it is difficult. When you have several people in an office, it quickly becomes too complex to handle without devoting your life to it."

Challenge
"We were experiencing frustrations with mailbox and size limitations on documents, so I decided to move all of the hosting in-house. We also needed a reliable high-speed connection to the Internet and coordination of all of our business applications, from workstations to handheld devices and phones. Backup is vital in our business, so we require multiple layers of redundancy."

Solution
"Miklie has handled all of our computer and networking efforts. Mike set up Microsoft Exchange Server, making us self-sufficient. He also installed a 100MB fiber optic connection for us, a portion of which we resell to others on our floor. We’re phasing out blackberries and rolling out pocket PC devices right now, and Mike continues to maintain and enhance our backup systems. All of these projects were relatively glitch-free. He did it when he said he would and it went very, very well."

Results
"Miklie is skilled at interfacing with people who don’t know much about IT and then delivering the functionality we’re trying to achieve. We’ve gotten a qualitative and quantitative leap in our ability to receive documents quickly, making our processes more real time. Our employees can now access email via VPN on their home computers or via the Web - it gives us a technological cache, which is great."