Speaker: Eric Moore, Director of Information Technology, Finley Resources, Inc.
What business challenge(s) was your company looking to solve prior to using Fluid IT?
Eric Moore: With the oil and gas industry fluctuating the way it does, oftentimes, we find ourselves spending a lot of money on equipment, software, and licenses as the company grew. But of course, with the good times in the oil and gas industry, sometimes comes the slow times. When times would slow, we often found ourselves kind of holding the bag with a lot of this equipment that we purchased, and a lot of the licenses. When times would slow for a long time it got difficult to even be able to afford to replace some of this infrastructure and equipment. We then end up spending a lot of time and money maintaining them and keeping them up and running. We realized it was time to change the way we thought about IT and how we can support the business. We needed to more align with kind of the fluctuations in the business and the oil markets in general. We needed something that was kind of scalable. You know, when times are good, we can scale up and when time slowed, we could scale down. But make it affordable and economical... and make it make sense. And that's when we started looking at MSP companies and that's when we found Fluid IT.
How has that situation changed or improved with Fluid IT?
Eric Moore: Since having Fluid IT on board we've had a lot less downtime. A lot less sitting around waiting for servers to come back online, or backups to be restored because a system crashed, or something along those lines. But beyond that, Fluid IT has helped us focus on not just fixing problems and just keeping things running, but really look into the future and see how we can actually impact the business, and how we can help steer and lead the business technologically. It's been probably five years now since I've worked here, and with Fluid IT. I think they're kind of becoming, not just part of the business, but an important part of the business.
Can you encapsulate what Fluid IT has meant to your company?
Eric Moore: Fluid IT has made a huge impact on our business. Being a smaller business it's hard to build a large IT team; especially with fluctuations in the oil and gas industry. It becomes hard to run your your small business IT like an enterprise. And I think that's what, where Fluid IT has been the most impactful for us is they're able to bring enterprise grade IT planning, goal setting, and things like that to a small company with one internal IT person that just wouldn't have really the time, to do a lot of those things. ...Fluid IT's challenged the company to ... branch out and try new technology. And a lot of it has been extremely successful for us. Our computer systems can run more efficiently sometimes but we're more secure as well. Fluid IT's focus on cybersecurity is up there... top of the industry. Bringing that all, again, to a small business has been huge. That's normally things you'd see in a medium-size to larger-sized enterprise. And we're able to bring that to a small business like us thanks to Fluid IT.
