Arizona Technology & Innovation: OneNeck IT Services

March 23, 2011

Transcript:

Ted Simons: In tonight's edition of "Horizon"'s ongoing series Arizona technology and innovation, we take a look at a Scottsdale-based I.T. company, OneNeck I.T. Looks to build and expands on a variety of I.T. and hosting services. Here to talk about his company is Chuck Vermillion, the founder and CEO. He received the governor's Celebration of Innovation CEO of the year award. Thank you for joining us tonight on "Horizon."

Chuck Vermillion: You are welcome. Thank you for having me.

Ted Simons: I got to get a little slow. This is stuff beyond my pay grade but what exactly does your company do?

Chuck Vermillion: In a nut shell, one neck hosts and manages companies enterprise systems for them.

Ted Simons: What does that mean?

Chuck Vermillion: So the enterprise systems are E.R.P. systems often timed referred to are very large computer systems that run the entirety of large organizations. So it would run the financial systems, their accounts payable systems, their shipping and receiving systems, warehouse management systems, order entry systems. It's all combined in a single package. And those packages are quite complex. Are very difficult to manage and we find that companies like to consider having someone who is professionally experienced managing those kind of systems move them from their facilities to our facilities, our data centers here in town will host them and manage them and all they do is use them.

Ted Simons: Is that, we hear about cloud computing a lot. Is that what you are talking about?

Chuck Vermillion: Cloud computing is one of our new primary technology enablers. Many cases our customers own their own servers and have individual servers for individual applications. Cloud computing is providing what they refer to as virtue servers. So they can partition a cluster of physical servers, and create a number of virtual servers that look and feel for all purposes like a standalone physical server. What it allows you to do is become much more efficient. Instead of using 10% of the capacity on a single server, you could use 100% of capacity by having all of those servers virtualized.

Ted Simons: OK. So I have got my finance, my accounting, my manufacturing, my sales, my service, all going to you, all going to a cloud? Where is it all going?

Chuck Vermillion: Well, in our case, we have a couple of clouds. One is in our data center in Tempe and one is in Gilbert and a third is in New Jersey. So there we have clustered servers. We have disks, disk and backup that we also serve to store information and then back that information up. So we have three separate clouds. And depending on the customer and the desire of the data center that would be where that cloud actually physically exists. But for the users it appears to be right there at their desktop.

Ted Simons: And obviously that image is there and it feels like it's there. But it's over there. How do I know that it's secure? If I got a business and I have got proprietary interests and such I want to make sure no one is poking around. How do you know? What kind of security is involved?

Chuck Vermillion: That's a great question. We employ about 20 security experts, network security experts whose full time job it is to help ensure we have the appropriate fire walls and technologies in place to ensure that only our customers can come into our facilities and those customers can only see their environments versus other customers' environments. And it's worked well. We have never had a security breach in our company. We are pleased to say. And obviously there's lots of people that are real interested in doing that. Maybe I just tempt they wanted to try. Hopefully not.

Ted Simons: Hopefully not. I know what your company does in providing these kind of services but let's say me as someone who wants to listen to music, look at movies, read books, is that the future of those kinds of things? It seems like cloud computing, everything will be out there somewhere for me to go get. That seems like that is the wave of the future.

Chuck Vermillion: Oh, I think it is absolutely the wave of the future. On an individual basis, you can back your home computers up right in the cloud. So that as an example, if you store your, take photos and you store those photos in a photo bucket or one of those shutter fly web sites you are storing your photos on the cloud and the good news is if something happens to your computer or to your house, unfortunately, the photos still exist.

Ted Simons: Now, if my business wants to have a certain look, a consistent look, a consistent feel to everything, or even at home, whatever, is that possible? Or do things have to kind of go on their own alleys to the clouds?

Chuck Vermillion: There's multiple paths, same paths to many clouds. Depends on which type of cloud you are trying to access and who's providing that. From your home computer over your internet you could get the Amazon's cloud. If you are a OneNeck customers you could get to our cloud but you could get to multiple clouds via that internet path.

Ted Simons: Talk to us about why you started this company or how this company got started, your involvement with it and what you are looking back when this thing got started and what you are looking at now.

Chuck Vermillion: Well, we started back in 1996, had an idea of -- we were working for a company that had was a standalone entity, spun out of a much larger apparent company. We didn't have our own enterprise systems. We are using our parent's system. We had to host and build our own data center and as their director of I.T. I had absolutely no idea of building a data source center was so we looked to outsource that to provide that to other parties. With we did a nationwide search and came up with a company no town which was ultimately called SEV computer systems. And we chose them to host and manage our servers. Right? This is a precursor to the cloud. We had individual servers. And into that implementation of that system for us, our parent company got sold and we decided that working for a much larger entity wasn't our thing. We approached the outsourcer and said why don't we build a business for you? We will bring the application competency to you and they said sure. And with the blessings of our parent company, we did leave, and built a business providing application services on top of this data center hosted server capability.

Ted Simons: With that in mind and with the history and what you are doing now and what you see in the future, pretty exciting time to be in the high-tech field.

Chuck Vermillion: Oh, absolutely. You know, going back to cloud, cloud is really enabled companies to get into much more complicated environments, much more redundancy at a fraction of the cost of doing it for yourself. And ides transforming the way people look at I.T. as opposed to providing your own I.T. or having your own I.T. staff you can realistically and reliably engage with parties such as OneNeck to take that pain away to know you have professional people managing for you.

Ted Simons: Congratulations on your success and continued success and it just seems like every year something new is popping up. Now it's all cloud computing and sounds like you are there. So congratulations.

Chuck Vermillion: Thanks very much.