Comcast Business provides the net, literally, for IT services company
Walking a tightrope is a dangerous, thrilling and sometimes lucrative profession. Only a fool, however, takes on the challenge without a safety net.
Today's 24/7 always-on business economy has created a 21st Century need for safety nets, as in reliable networks that provide fail-safe service to those walking on the tightrope of providing network-reliant IT professional services.
EVOLV, a Eugene, Ore.-based IT specialist company based that provides technology resources for businesses with hardware and software solutions, effectively delivers the safety net that keeps an increasingly exotic array of companies operating smoothly round-the-clock. It's EVOLV walking the tightrope because, in the end, EVOLV has to be around to fix whatever might go wrong to keep the client up and running and servicing its customers.
EVOLV, of course, needs its own safety net. In this case, Comcast Business makes sure that its operations never drop into free fall. Of course, companies like EVOLV and Comcast Business--and probably even the end user servicing the public--don't think along those kinds of archaic terms. For them it's not about walking a tightrope or having a safety net to make sure you don't go down, it's about broadband connectivity and bandwidth and download speeds.
When it comes to that, EVOLV has no complaints about Comcast.
"I think I've seen one major outage in the three years I've been with them and that was taken care of within a half day," said Giri Kowalke, EVOLV's owner/president. "I feel that kind of track record over a three-year time period is pretty stellar."
Kowalke's five-person operation runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and promises emergency response within one hour of a trouble report from any of its 300 or so customers scattered across the U.S. Having looked around at what was available from traditional telco providers, Kowalke could see that Comcast was by far the lowest price available. But he still needed to be convinced that a company with Comcast in its name would be as reliable as a traditional commercial services provider like Qwest. Comcast, after all, is a cable company ... and not always a popular one at that.
"The residential tech support is just awful, really horrible support," Kowalke said. "I've seen people with voice service and it's one out of every two times you pick up the phone you may not get a dialtone."
That's the kind of word-of-mouth Comcast battles on a daily basis. It's also why Comcast Business--which is a completely separate arm of the giant MSO--occasionally loses customer opportunities and more than occasionally needs to take extra pains to convince business customers that its focus is commercial, not entertainment.
"We were definitely worried about that when we first came onto Comcast," Kowalke admitted.
It's not unusual, although it might be unfair, for business customers to think that way, admitted Dave Brown vice president of business services for Comcast Business in Oregon and the Southwest Washington State region.
"If you have business needs, you want priority repair and response. We target four-hour mean time to arrive and repair. We have dedicated commercial techs who do all our installs and repairs. The equipment is a higher class of equipment that allows for different feature sets both on the voice and data side. It's very different and when you explain the level of value that comes with a commercial product people understand the distinction," he said.
Kowalke did, especially when comparing dollars for data.
"The price point is very exceptional for what you can get," said Kowalke, who has a 50/10 Mbps Internet package and voice service but has passed on television. He also got multiple static IP addresses and a dedicated business line, he said so that he can be confident that his network can do the job his customers demand--and if it doesn't, that Comcast will be on hand to fix it.
It is, said Brown, a typical scenario.
"There are lots of EVOLVs out there," he said.
And all of them need the ultimate safety net that comes from a reliable service provider.
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