Established in 1989, Softchoice has evolved from a small business out of an apartment to a billion dollar enterprise with a staff of more than 1,200. The company is represented in every major city throughout the U.S. and Canada. Its headquarters are located in Toronto, ON.
The privately held company is dedicated to helping organizations use technology to improve productivity, competitiveness, and success. As a managed service provider, Softchoice works with leading brands to deliver licensing, networking, security, business, creativity, education, and operating systems to its client base.
Through its range of offerings, Softchoice provides scalable services that monitor, maintain, and improve clients’ IT environments through teams of advanced technicians. Areas of expertise include client computing, data centers, networking, security, storage, data management, and unified communications.
IT Study
In collaboration with VMware, Softchoice recently released a study on effective IT infrastructure. The report, Virtual Space Race: How IT With The Right Stuff Creates a Competitive Advantage, states the results of a series of surveys, which were conducted by Softchoice of IT managers and line-of-business managers in the U.S. to examine their expectations around IT department responsiveness and IT infrastructure agility.
The rise of mobility, cloud, and big data has empowered more front office workers to take control over IT. “Every year we see more of an organization’s technology spend move from the back office—IT—to the front office. We launched this study to discover how ready organizations are for the implications of this shift,” says Doug Sekus, director of business development, datacenter, Softchoice. “It’s clear that having an agile, efficient, highly automated, and virtualized IT infrastructure means being able to implement new applications faster, respond to the needs of employees and external customers quicker, and focus more time on strategic projects that grow the business. What we didn’t know going in how far the competitive gap is between those who have the right infrastructure and those who don’t.”
Sekus says the findings were pretty alarming, not just in terms of how many businesses are still equipped with an outdated data center, but just how much of an advantage having ‘the right stuff’ really is.
“In the process of doing this study, we confirmed that most IT managers are spending too much time on ‘help desk’ type assignments and not enough time on strategic projects. We also found a direct correlation between having an agile, efficient IT infrastructure and IT managers being viewed as strategic partners within the organization,” he adds.
The report notes that the prevalence of mobile and cloud technologies enable workers to do more when it comes to IT, but to what cost to IT?
The study finds that IT departments with the right infrastructure are four times more likely to deploy new applications within one business week compared to those that don’t; and that 58 percent of organizations take more than a month to deploy new applications.
Additionally, the study finds that 61 percent of organizations have virtualized less than half of their IT environments and 46 percent of organizations still lack hybrid cloud capabilities.
According to the study, “demand for an agile, efficient IT infrastructure is at an all-time high, yet most organizations lack the capacity to quickly deploy and manage applications on and off premises in response to the needs of front office employees and customers. Leveraging new technology to compete in the marketplace is a virtual space race, one in which organizations with the right IT infrastructure have the competitive advantage to respond quicker and plant their flag first in the market.”
The report further indicates that companies with sufficient IT infrastructures are viewed as more effective by their organizations.
Help with IT
Softchoice’s value is in designing, implementing, and managing a more efficient data center, one which allows IT managers to spend more time on strategic projects that help grow the business and better serve customers. “Our guiding principle for every data center project is to shift IT dollars and resources from maintenance activities to innovation initiatives that create alignment between IT capabilities and business objectives,” says Sekus.
The company achieves this through a holistic approach, leveraging its vendor partnerships to design and implement complete server, storage, software, and networking solutions that are the right fit for a business.
“We also take the pressure off maintaining your new data center with our managed services offerings. We monitor and optimize the efficiency of your IT infrastructure, providing mentoring services for your IT managers, and making future needs assessments to ensure you always stay ahead of the demands of your business,” he concludes. SW
Apr2014, Software Magazine
