Enhancing business profitability: companies provide cost-effective IT options.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: TELECOM & TECHNOLOGY

A year and a half ago, PDC Inc. Engineers in Anchorage had a second office in Fairbanks, each with a resident information technology, or IT, worker. The company wanted to expand, but doing so was difficult because keeping the offices linked together by using centralized data, organized data backup, and simple day-today communication was a logistical hurdle. With a limited IT staff, PDC Principal Electrical Engineer Robert Posma says, just day-to-day maintenance could be difficult.

"It was hard if there was a major problem, or if someone left or was sick," he says. "We were having some interesting difficulties managing the two plants."

Enter AlasConnect, a company that specializes in outsourced IT that, last December, was purchased by Valley-based Matanuska Telephone Association.

"Bringing AlasConnect on was one of the best ideas our IT crew has had in a long time," Posma says.

"We have the ability to bring in 30 to 40 highly skilled IT technicians to address all aspects of IT support for a company and save them money at the same time," says Jeff Yauney, president and CEO of AlasConnect. "It is impossible for a single IT person to be a specialist in all areas and AlasConnect didn't grow up as a telecommunications company, we've always been an IT shop focused on providing high quality customer support."

Now, PDC has offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks as well as Mat-Su, Juneau, Soldotna, and a small, one-person branch office in Seattle. Everyone can tap into AutoCAD files of current projects and make changes to them if necessary. And quick, face-to-face meetings are easy to set up, Posma says.

"One of the things we use extensively now is Skype for Business. It allows individual engineers or anyone on their desktop to connect nearly instantaneously with anyone else in nearly any of our locations," he says. "Just that ability to communicate has really helped."

Posma says the company has been able to be more diverse in its work products, bringing in employees with specific skill sets even though the project may be hundreds of miles from where they work. The structural engineer working in Seattle, for example, worked on several projects in Alaska before moving to Washington state. One project was at the Alaska Native Medical Center, and Posma says the engineer continues to work on elements of that project from Seattle.

"We frequently bring him in on conversations. Our architect [on that project] is in Seattle, so things go smoothly," Posma says.

Posma says he was PDC's IT guy for the first ten years the company was in existence.

"That was my nighttime job, in addition to my day job," he says. "I realized if I were going to be working late, it would be better if those were billable hours."

Yauney says that's the case for many small business owners and managers. Core business needs get put on hold if a server goes down or a virus creeps into the system.

"We help free them up so they can focus on their...