RoundTower Technologies Sharpens Focus On Business Objectives and Client Experience

Their successful business model is straightforward, their customer focus, clear.

"Our model has been to find the best talent, regardless of where that talent lives, make them a part of the RoundTower Technologies family and then make them available to customers whenever they are needed and wherever they are located," says Jim Burden, sales manager for RoundTower Columbus. "This model has proven to be very successful and enables us to have the very best talent working on our customers’ projects."

RoundTower, a technology consulting company consisting of 385 IT professionals with offices in 13 cities across the United States, opened its offices in 2007 and has been supporting the Columbus, Ohio marketplace from its Cincinnati-based headquarters for the past few years.

"We officially opened the RoundTower Columbus Office in January 2017," Burden recalls. "We help transform how our customers realize and deliver value from technology. Our focus is on meeting business objectives with improved agility, increased quality of service and lower overall expenses. This provides our customers with a new strategic tool for driving advancement rather than just being viewed as another cost center to their business.

The RoundTower customer experience, Burden notes, is the company’s most important offering.

"Customers feel the difference the moment they engage with us," he continues. "We begin by asking the right questions about a company, the state of its technology, and its business goals.  We take the time to discover its IT environment, document its strengths and weaknesses, and validate whether it is meeting the company’s present and future needs."

Focus areas include:

• Security – RoundTower provides consulting services and solutions around governance, risk and compliance, security controls, and has a managed security operations center that lets many of its customers hand over the complex and often daunting task of monitoring and identifying all the latest threats that are hitting their businesses daily.

• Cloud and Dev Ops – From helping customers identify, architect and run public, private and hybrid cloud platforms to automation and orchestration within their environments and continuous delivery and SDLC automation, RoundTower offers it all.

• Data Center Infrastructure – RoundTower provides services and products around computer, network, storage and data protection, and is helping many of its customers move from traditional infrastructure to software-defined everything.

• ServiceNow – It’s the company’s fastest growing practice, and it helps customers transform their businesses with everything from ITSM and ITOM to onboarding and technician portability and profitability.

• End User Computing – RoundTower focuses on the customer experience and helps its customers pick the right technology to support that experience with VDI, mobile device management, digital workspace and collaboration solutions.

• IoT, Big Data, Analytics – From Splunk workshops to data warehouse offloading and migration to Hadoop and predictive analytics, RoundTower helps customers make sense of the large amounts of data they have and puts it to practical business uses to improve customer experiences or find new revenue streams.

"Our Columbus team has over 100 years of IT experience," notes Burden, who has been selling IT services to the Columbus marketplace for more than 30 years, honing his experience in consulting, end user computing, storage and data protection, cloud and networking services. His earlier work was with Basicomputer, Sarcom, Bay Networks and EMC Corporation.

Supporting Jim is the experienced Columbus sales and technical team consisting of:

• Tim Hollingsworth – Hollingsworth, a senior sales executive with over 25 years of  experience in the IT field helping customers solve complex problems and deal with multiple products and manufactures, has been with RoundTower since October 2017.  He previously worked with Sarcom, SingleSource IT, Pinnacle and Advizex.

• Alison Poor – Poor has over 10 years of experience in the IT industry helping customers get the most out of their technology. She worked previously for Xerox, EMC and Gerber Financial, and has been with RTT since March 2017.

• John McKenna – McKenna has been a fixture around Columbus for 25 years helping customers with needs that range from IT consulting and networking to communications and cloud. He has worked for Cisco, NetTech, BlueMile and has his own consulting company (Alta1) and has represented RoundTower since August 2018.

• Jason Holt – Holt has served as RoundTower Columbus’ technical quarterback since April 2017, helping ensure that the right technical resource is aligned for each customer engagement. He brings a breadth of knowledge in all areas of IT, specializing in storage, backup, cloud, automation, networking and security. Holt has provided IT solutions in the Columbus market for over 15 years, with stints at Chase, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Nationwide.

• Mike Caral – Caral has nearly 40 years of IT-related experience as a customer and supplier in the areas of pre-sales, customer service, enterprise architecture, hybrid cloud and technical enablement. His roles include enterprise architect, systems engineer, evaluation and integration analyst, technical consultant, field engineer and product manager. Caral worked with JP Morgan Chase, AEP and EMC prior to joining RoundTower in 2016.

• Austin Gresham – Gresham has 25-plus years of experience in information technology, holding roles in operations, engineering, architecture and consulting. He has worked with clients in state and local government, financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, retail and healthcare. His broad experience across not only verticals but technologies allows him to advise clients on their transformation and helps them apply the use of technology to enhance their businesses.  Gresham worked with JP Morgan Chase, Avail Technologies, EMC and Virtual Instruments prior to joining RoundTower in 2016.

"This team makes up a local arm of the RoundTower team, but we’re supported by hundreds of technical folks across the country," Burden notes.

Engagements the team has had with Columbus customers include:

• Cloud Rationalization – The team has helped several organizations around Columbus determine whether public, private or hybrid cloud is the right fit for them technically and financially. RoundTower takes a holistic approach to these assessments, focusing not only on technology and connectivity, but also the cultural and financial aspects of such decisions. By starting with an assessment of the current environment and layering in the goals of the business, the Columbus team has helped several customers transform their organizations to take advantage of the various aspects of the cloud.

• Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) – RoundTower Columbus has helped several local organizations assess their DR posture and get to a more resilient state by way of traditional and forward-thinking methods. This has resulted in multi-million-dollar savings and a quicker time to DR for several customers.

• VDI Architectural Design and Implementation – One Columbus customer needed to migrate 2,000 users to a new VDI platform, and Burden’s team architected and implemented a solution consisting of VMWare Horizon wrapped with proper secure connectivity in a very shortened timeframe, helping the customer achieve a time to market benefit.

• Active Directory Upgrade – The team helped a customer upgrade to AD 2016 to gain functionality and support, identifying and remediating medium-level security concerns and performing the upgrade in a timely and successful manner for that customer.

• Cost Containment and Financial Analysis – RoundTower Columbus has worked with several clients to make sense of complex vendor solutions (like ELAs), comparing these against industry peers and other solutions. A financial analysis team made up of former customers and financial experts quickly helps customers understand how to leverage agreements for the most favorable terms and match them against a company’s operational or capital budget needs.

• Multi-Vendor Selection – The Columbus team has helped several customers quickly evaluate several vendor solutions (storage, hyper converged, backup, collaboration) by leveraging its deep knowledge and agnostic view of the solutions to its hands-on lab for testing. The team boiled down dozens of vendor solutions, establishing a top two or three based on customer requirements, allowing a more expedient decision and implementation.

Burden sums up RoundTower’s success in Columbus and all its markets with a simple observation.

"It’s the quality of people we’ve hired," he says. "Our technical depth is unmatched in the industry. RoundTower has stayed true to form since its inception, only hiring top-level talent and delivering unmatched experience to our customers. We look forward to meeting new customers and discovering how we can leverage our expertise to help them transform their IT environments."

RoundTower Columbus is located at The Hub, 4510 Kenny Road, Columbus, OH 43220. For more information, call 614.581.9032, email  jim.burden@roundtower.com or visit www.roundtower.com