 |
  Cloud Computing Helps Industrial Door Company, Inc. Grow
Read the customer story now, or click here to watch a six-minute video.  OverviewIndustrial Door Company (IDC) has been providing commercial and residential garage doors to customers in the Upper Midwest since it was founded by Gerald Sizer in 1974. "Gerry used to tell the story of how he would go pick up the product, deliver it, and install it himself," recalls CFO, Kathy Wall. "It really started as a grass-roots kind of thing." Things have changed since then. Gerry is now semi-retired, and his two children, Jeremy and Jodi have stepped up to manage the company. IDC has expanded to include Industrial Spring Company (formerly Twin City Spring), as well as Home Spring Manufacturing in Arizona. They also recently acquired an automatic garage door fireplace company, which has created a new division for them. Challenge As a second-generation, family-owned business that has seen rapid growth, IDC knows something about the growing pains associated with expansion. One of those challenges was the need to keep up-to-date on expensive new technology in an economic climate that is increasingly difficult for the building and housing industries. When Kathy Wall started with the company in 2008, she saw the evidence of the struggle. The servers had gotten old over the years. While they still worked, they were starting to have more and more problems and no longer seemed fit for the tasks at hand. "We didn't have any redundancy," Kathy recalls. "We were doing backups once a day, but if something were to fail during the day, we were redoing things. It wasn't a good sign." Solution By 2010, IDC realized that they couldn't wait any longer to come up with a better solution. They'd been working with Solbrekk for over a decade and had always been pleased with the service Solbrekk provided. So when Solbrekk introduced the Cloud Computing hosted environment, IDC gave it some serious thought. After weighing the costs, Kathy decided that switching to Solbrekk's Cloud Computing made more sense than simply replacing the servers. "I can tell you that it was probably the best decision I've made in my career here," she says. Benefits & Results As the CFO of IDC, Kathy wanted to know how Cloud Computing could help their bottom line. "I'm always looking at the ROI on something like this," she says. "I want to make sure it's beneficial for both parties." She chose Cloud Computing because of the up-front savings. To buy more servers at that time meant also hiring someone who knew how to operate them. IDC did not employ a full-time IT staff and would have had to add support to run the servers. By choosing Cloud Computing instead, IDC was able to take advantage of Solbrekk's full-time help desk. "It's five days a week, and it's good support," Kathy says. "Everyone here loves that they are able to call Solbrekk if they have a problem." Additionally, Cloud Computing has made future growth simple and cost-effective for IDC. "We've been able to keep growing without adding more infrastructure," Kathy says. "With the acquisition of the automatic garage door fireplace division, for example, we would have had to add another server." Cloud Computing has provided a flexible infrastructure that expands right along with them. "With the acquisition, we had some bumps with our software providers, and Solbrekk worked with them. There wasn't any finger pointing, just constantly working toward solving the issues." "Solbrekk has been so good to work with," Kathy concluded. "They really do solve your problems." |
 |
||
 |
||||
BACK