CDN's 2009 Channel Elite Awards Winners

Gold 2009 CDN Channel Elite Award Winner

Best Service Organization

Nitro is the champ in Best Service Organization

By Paolo Del Nibletto

What would a company do if disaster strikes? - A real disaster such as a fire. No business really wants to think about that, but it could happen.

It happened to PrimeCorp. This Ottawa-based business suffered a devastating fire that destroyed their office.

While other building tenants scrambled to keep their businesses running, PrimeCorp was good-to-go thanks to an innovative new service offered by Nitro Microsystems of Ottawa.

Nitro, a previous Channel Elite Award winner, created a service that allowed PrimeCorp to be “always-on.”

Not only did they have daily back-up verifications, but more importantly, all their data was recovered.

The always-on approach is a proactive service instead of reactive, with off-site storage, scheduled server maintenance, around the clock network monitoring, anti-virus and patch management.

The company has a number of clients that rely on this 24 x 7 service in order to ensure business continuity and maintain “always-on” connectivity.

The fire was a result of arson and destroyed the office of PrimeCorp and other businesses housed in the same building in downtown Ottawa.

The fire occurred late in the night when the offices were closed and no one was injured, however the building sustained substantial damage and tenants needed to find temporary locations to run their businesses.

PrimeCorp entered into a NitroSure Managed Services agreement with Nitro a few months earlier.

The NitroSure program including daily back-up verifications and monthly test restores to ensure that the data and information is recoverable in the event of an emergency.

The Nitro team recommended off-site storage of back-up tapes and PrimeCorp agreed.

What this unfortunate incident showed the marketplace was that Nitro was able to react quickly to emergencies which obviously are unplanned and unscheduled events that no one can predict.

In addition, Nitro’s Help Desk Call Centre handles calls from individual users for day to day issues and other emergency services are handled through the company’s service coordination team.

These service coordinators schedule and dispatch senior level technicians and follow strict protocols and procedures that have been put in place to ensure the best customer service possible.

The NitroSure program also includes the option for clients to have 24 x 7 emergency network support.

On the night of the fire at PrimeCorp, Nitro’s network monitoring system’s alarms sent alerts to the senior technicians on call. Unable to access the building immediately, the Nitro team began planning recovery procedures knowing that a team would have to be dispatched first thing in the morning when the emergency crews granted access to the building. Donned with hard hats and steel-toed work boots, Nitro sent several technicians to PrimeCorp’s office. They were able to salvage some IT equipment but in the end everything had to be replaced.

Days would be needed before the new equipment would arrive so Nitro instead hosted PrimeCorp, which is a service that Nitro does not normally provide.

All of the company’s data was recovered and absolutely nothing was lost. PrimeCorp employees were all up and running within eight hours.

In fact, Nitro even provided temporary office space for some of the employees so that they could get back to work quickly and service their own clients without any interruption.

“E-mail is absolutely critical to our operation,” explains Nick Pantieras, owner of PrimeCorp, “and thankfully Nitro was able to get our e-mail server up and running in a matter of hours and then continue to host our e-mail for well over a week so that we could continue with business as usual.”

It would be months before PrimeCorp could get back into their original office space.

Within a week and a half of the fire, they relocated to another temporary building.

“Our clients were well aware that our building was the target of an arsonist and were therefore patient and understanding that we were temporarily out of reach. Given that downtime was miraculously minimized, I am confident this whole incident did not have an impact on our bottom-line, thanks to the incredible dedication of the Nitro team,” Pantieras said.

Last year's CDN 2008 Channel Elite Awards Winners