Since its founding in 1986 by CEO John Petote, Goleta-based CIO Solutions has provided information technology and management services to Central Coast residents. Initially, the technology company sold computer products, but now customers rely on CIO Solutions’ reputation of providing high-quality services.
Among those services is First Call Resolution Objective, which solves 95 percent of computer issues remotely.
“We have remote engineers standing by who handle the calls that come in, and the average wait time is less than eight seconds,” said Eric Egolf, vice president of operations. “Instead of going through a secretary who would find a technical resource for the problem, our customer speaks with a remote engineer who asks a series of questions that takes about a minute, and they handle the issue.”
When a company needs to manage its IT infrastructure, CIO Solutions can manage all of its IT issues or a portion of them for a monthly fee so the business doesn’t need to maintain IT experts on staff. CIO Solutions’ clients range from small business with five to 10 people on staff to larger organizations such as Cottage Health Systems.
“Obviously we can’t run all of Cottage Hospital’s IT, so we run a portion of it,” Egolf said. “For smaller businesses, we can be the single entity to manage all of their needs. We have virtual chief information officers to do budgeting and planning to make sure businesses have made the proper technology choices. Providing companies with these services is a bulk of what we’ve been doing in the last five years.”
Cloud services are another big development for CIO Solutions during the last few years. A company can move its servers from its own premises and pay for it be hosted with CIO Solutions for a monthly fee.
CIO Solutions’ 24-person staff provides IT and management services for clients in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Among its clients are Radius Group Commercial Real Estate, The Towbes Group, Cottage Heath Systems, West Coast Asset Management, Ventura County Business Bank, the Bank of Santa Barbara and the Cachuma Operation and Maintenance Board.
Egolf said the company operates on 10 core values to ensure that the CIO Solutions team can provide its customers with the best services.
“There are core values that we expect all of our employees to live by,” he said. “Running a technology business is not just about having highly technical people on staff, but it’s about having everyone work as a team to help our customers.”
Egolf said CIO Solutions provides resources for startup technology companies in Goleta.
“We’re the glue that supports the underlying infrastructure for what makes the start-ups,” he said. “We’re supporting industry standards, whereas a lot of startups are developing intellectual property.”
He said the biggest change for the future of the IT industry will be the decisions customers make regarding buying or renting equipment at another facility, which is typically called cloud computing.
“I think the biggest change during the next three to five years is that customers are going to have a choice over whether they’re going to own their equipment or rent it, and have their applications provided over the Internet. That decision is based on a lot of criteria, and they’re going to need a company to help them make these important decisions,” Egolf said. “Not everything should be in the cloud, and we’ll help our clients make those decisions.”
CIO Solutions is a sponsor of the Santa Barbara Executive Roundtable and the Central Coast MIT Enterprise Forum. CIO Solutions’ Petote is a member of the UCSB Economic Forecast Project.
— Noozhawk business writer Taylor Orr can be reached at torr@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @NoozhawkBiz, @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.