Bank on IT

IPC Technologies’ TechFirst program provides Virginia Blood Services with vital, 24x7 support.

For most small to midsize businesses it’s impractical to assemble an IT staff with all of the skills and experience needed to support today’s complex networks. Having such a staff available 24 hours a day, seven days a week is virtually impossible. Yet that’s just the kind of 24x7 technical know-how Virginia Blood Services gets with IPC Technology’s TechFirst program.

“TechFirst has been very successful for us,” said Tom Smith, director of Information Technology for Virginia Blood Services. “We used to have an internal help desk but it was staffed by just one full-time person — everybody else would pitch in as needed. That meant that when the full-time person was working on a problem, the other members of the department were disrupted from their project work if something else came up.

“Now, TechFirst handles the bulk of our support calls, which frees up our IT team.”

Meeting a Need
Virginia Blood Services is a private, non-profit organization that conducts more than 2,000 blood drives each year, collects more than 100,000 donations and provides blood services throughout Central Virginia. It is not affiliated with the American Red Cross and receives no government or United Way funding.

Virginia Blood Services relies heavily on its IT infrastructure to support its initiatives. For more than three years, IPC Technologies has played a key role in helping the organization’s two full-time and one part-time IT staffers support more than 150 end-users.

“I was familiar with IPC Technologies from when I worked for another company,” Smith said. “When I joined Virginia Blood Services, they contacted me and introduced us to the TechFirst program. We soon realized it would be a good fit for us.”

Help Is Available
The TechFirst program is staffed by highly skilled technicians, with additional support from IPC’s engineering staff. Through the program, Virginia Blood Services gains access to this collective skill set.

“Instead of having just one full-time person, we get a team of people who are very knowledgeable,” Smith said. “In addition, the folks on the front line can turn to more senior technical people should they run into a problem they can’t solve themselves. That’s a capability we don’t have at Virginia Blood Services.”

What’s more, the TechFirst team is available to handle calls around the clock.

“In the past, the IT department here had a beeper that was rotated among staff members weekly. Each person took a rotation to handle anything that came up on nights and weekends,” Smith said. “Now, TechFirst provides 24x7 coverage and they can handle almost all of the after-hours calls. And we’re able to do all of these things at a very reasonable cost.”

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