Local IT firms take clients into the cloud

FORT COLLINS – Bob Vomaske, CEO of Vista Solutions Corp., has some tough-love advice for clients and computer users set in their ways: It’s time to give up – and get over – the personal computer.

“No other item will a business spend that much money on and know they will be unhappy with it between 36 and 48 months down the road,” Vomaske said. “It’s had a pretty good ride, but it is technology that is fundamentally 20 years old.”

Based in Fort Collins, Vista Solutions is encouraging customers, including Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace and health-care industries, to think outside the box, beyond the desktop hard drive, and toward “the cloud,” the Web-based alternative to using hard-drive storage and servers. Or, as Vomaske calls it, “the Internet with a different paint job.”

Vista Solutions enables customers to connect to a computer desktop from a number of devices, including iPads and other tablets. And while many individual and corporate users still need to be goaded into relinquishing the physical security of having their hard drive sitting right next to their workspace and their servers in their offices, the cost and data benefits that come with online and virtual management increasingly outweigh the conventional way of computing.

Vista Solutions isn’t alone among regional information-technology companies that are evolving and integrating along with the sea changes in the world of IT. Recent acquisitions involving Northern Colorado firms Connecting Point of Greeley, and HEIT Inc. of Fort Collins, have local businesses growing into larger enterprises and taking willing passengers into the cloud.

From proto-PCs to tablets

The personal computer was born and went through its early growth stages in the late 1960s and 1970s. Among the pioneering local computer businesses was Hasp Corp., which began in 1975 selling proto-PC data terminal equipment, along with calculators and surveying tools, produced by companies such as Hewlett Packard and IBM. Hasp continued to provide computer hardware to clients for several decades, while other businesses also emerged to sell hardware or provide a range of IT software services.

Vomaske and his wife, Linda, bought Hasp in 2003. At the same time, they also bought Vista Solutions, which started in the 1990s in Loveland as a consulting firm.

“It just made sense to us that you’d want to integrate a company focused on best-in-class hardware along with a company that is focused on proven software solutions,” Vomaske said.

Within that scope, Vista Solutions has brought cloud-based and virtual computer arrangements to businesses that might not otherwise experiment with new IT systems or change their habits.

“We’re taking technologies and lessons learned in one environment (large corporations), and making them economically and practically available to small businesses in Northern Colorado,” Vomaske said.

Starting in 2005, Vista Solutions developed virtual desktop services for “a large auto manufacturer out of Detroit,” to minimize in-house maintenance and support Vomaske said. After all, for all the good that personal computers offer businesses, the modern PC-based office must deal with their shortcomings and failures — viruses, data corruption, backup problems and other common malfunctions. Vomaske said virtual services and other data-relaying and storage solutions have developed to remove those hardware-based potholes and let a company’s software perform its job.

Recently, Vista Solutions, which counts 13 employees and about $6 million in annual revenue, has enabled customers to access Windows 7 on Apple iPads and other tablets running non-Microsoft operating systems, another step in the evolution of virtual managed services. Other developments, such as Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and the rise of “thin client” blade servers that save space and reduce power consumption, also enable IT firms to give small business customizable experiences backed by reliable data-center services.

“About every software vendor is reinventing applications so they’re ‘thinner,’ faster and they can run on a cloud environment,” added Ted Warner, president of Connecting Point, a Greeley-based IT firm that has served a range of local, small and mid-sized businesses since 1985. “A lot of great solutions are being built to run across the Internet.”

Grow with the cloud

Connecting Point is among several regional IT businesses that are expanding with the cloud. Warner said the company, which has a staff of 30, just closed a new deal to establish a Denver office in the next month. In March, Connecting Point also purchased the computer division of a Laramie accounting/consulting firm to stretch into southern Wyoming.

“Individual businesses are becoming more and more dependent on their technology,” Warner said, and the last decade has provided more powerful and cheaper computing options for smaller enterprises.

The increase in bandwidth availability – and the related drop in price – is feeding the trends, Warner said, while allowing companies like Connecting Point to improve their support of clients.

“The old model was way more reactive,” Warner said. “The less they call us the better it is for us, and for them.”

Another local company, Fort Collins-based HEIT Inc., which specializes in data-security support for the financial industry, was bought by Computer Services Inc., a publicly traded company from Paducah, Ky., on Aug. 10. According to a press release, HEIT has a customer base of 400 clients, and the acquisition makes Computer Services one of the largest cloud-based service providers for financial institutions in the country.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to further invest, innovate and expand our national presence as a managed services provider, while also gaining the ability to offer many new services to our customers,´ said Dan Holt, HEIT CEO, in the release.

Holt will become general manager of Computer Services-Managed Services division once the sale is completed.

As cloud computing and bandwidth become more accessible – and less scary – to small businesses and even one-person shops, companies will continue to move toward being able to dispense both hardware and software solutions. A growing need to share data in-house and with other firms, and a heightened sense of cost-effectiveness during tight financial times, will also expedite the growth of cloud computing and virtual services.

Looking toward the future, Vomaske said the next phase will be “zero client” services involving even less hardware. Technology introduced in the past year now allows users to plug a keyboard and mouse into a tablet or a TV with computing capabilities and gain secure access to a business network system.

“A number of technologies have come together in the last couple of years to make this play well for small businesses,” Vomaske said. “The timing is really right.”

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