Case Study: NexTec
“We wouldn’t do anything in our cloud without consulting with Cascadeo.”
—NexTec founder Russ Harper
NexTec and Cascadeo Shift the Focus to Customer Relationships
NexTec was founded in the 1990s with the goal of providing a one-stop shop for accounting software and services in the days when networking meant physically connecting wires to servers. As their growth accelerated over the decades, NexTec’s expanding size, geographic footprint, and workforce led them on a familiar modernization path: from self-maintained on-premises infrastructure, to server colocation, and then into the private cloud.
However, private cloud wasn’t ideal either. NexTec needed a partner to support and guide them in their next modernization effort–public cloud–in the same way they guide and support their own clients. To manage their cloud services, with better help desk support, reliability, and opportunities to innovate, NexTec chose Cascadeo.
“We wouldn’t do anything in our cloud without consulting with Cascadeo,” said NexTec founder Russ Harper.
Evolving to Anticipate Client Needs
Cloud adoption can be nascent in NexTec’s industry and among their clients, but Harper and Victor Johnson, NexTec CTO, recognized public cloud transition would enable them to stay ahead of evolving client needs. Now, if they need to spin up new customer operating environments, they have the capacity and the knowledge to make that expansion happen in nearly real time. And while cloud security is ever-changing, Cascadeo’s expertise and support have fostered confidence and knowledge to meet those challenges.
NexTec’s days of worrying about servers overheating or failing, firewall patches breaking down security, and VPNs requiring complicated configurations are long gone. Their IT architecture and apps are backed up, highly available, and secure in the AWS cloud.
In turn, they can focus on customer relationships. “From our perspective, success looks like ongoing engagement,” Harper said. Because NexTec is no longer doing the work of running servers or managing a network, leadership’s focus can shift to exploring new offerings and cultivating repeat customers.
Future Disasters Averted
“One of the initiatives we’re working on now is disaster recovery,” said Harper. As recently as a decade ago, DR meant a rented server with huge hard drives in a warehouse, or even tape.
Now, working with Cascadeo and AWS, NexTec is developing the ability to replicate their cloud environment and come back online in under four hours, keeping their customers’ data and functions up and running in both everyday circumstances and during catastrophic events.
Transforming Applications in AWS
At the core of Cascadeo’s managed services practice is refactoring applications for the public cloud, and surfacing innovation opportunities within the AWS ecosystem.
With over 100 AWS certifications, Cascadeo’s engineers have the ability to deploy AWS services which help customers move away from legacy data centers, colocation, private clouds or any infrastructure that is incumbent on the client to maintain. When freed up from server or VM administration, teams have more time to focus on answering the questions that are critical to their business. In addition, Cascadeo offers professional services, so IT departments are never left without the people resources to solve problems impacting the organization and their customers.
Now that NexTec has partnered with Cascadeo, Harper said, “We’re doing things we weren’t doing before and we’re doing them much faster. That’s a huge benefit.”
About NexTec Group
NexTec Group is a national consulting firm specializing in industry-specific technology to help you manage your business. This includes Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI), Cloud and On-premise solutions for mid-sized businesses. We started the company because, as consultants, we worked with software sellers that had never walked a mile in their customers’ shoes. We had, and knew that we could offer something different: a company made up of consultants that had experience working in the industries that we were now advising. In the 25+ years that NexTec has been in business, we’ve developed close working relationships with our customers, partners and each other. We are proud of our 95% customer retention rate. See: https://www.nextecgroup.com/
About Cascadeo
Cascadeo is the cloud managed services and professional services partner that helps your organization meet internal goals like employee productivity and external goals like customer experience.
