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Single-Stop Network Solutions
Cybergnostics' Miller talks technology for companies that want to do IT like the big boys
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Business New Haven
9/4/2000
By: Mitchell Young
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Cybergnostics.net of Trumbull is headed by CEO Brad Miller. It was founded by Chief Technology Officer Andrew Greenawalt, who had been working as a networking consultant paid on a high dollar-per-hour basis to help companies build their networks. Greenawalt decided that for middle-market companies trying to follow big companies into the networking world, there must be a better way to design and build network services. Cybergnostics.net was created to provide turnkey IT infrastructures to middle-market companies. Miller discusses the needs of those companies, IT solutions and his company with BNH.
How does your company define 'middle' market?
Anywhere from $10 million to $1 billion in [annual] sales - companies that are big enough to need some sort of network infrastructure to manage their business. If they had sales databases or inventory information, they would want that shared by all their locations on the same basis. It would really stretch up to a billion in revenue where it still doesn't make sense for a company to have their own [network]; they don't quite have the size to leverage the users.
Where do you look geographically for customers?
It's a national search, but since we're a year and a half old, the bulk of the customers come from the tri-state [Connecticut, New York, New Jersey] area. Most of our clients have multiple locations, including around the world. They can be anywhere. If the decision-maker tends to be in the tri-state area, it makes it easier for us get comfortable with them.
What do you mean by providing a network infrastructure?
If you assume a company has multiple offices and PCs and a local area network to connect those PCs, what we do is start by connecting those offices to each other so they can share the same information, and then go out from there all the way up to the applications that are unique to how they run their business. We don't do PCs, we don't do local area networks; we start with Wide Area Networks. We become their ISP [Internet service provider] in terms of access to the Internet; we become their managed security service to manage their firewall; virus scanning for their e-mail to provide content filtering if they don't want their employees going certain places on the Web. We provide management to all of the networks, so if there is a hardware or circuit problem we're the ones to know about it first and to go about fixing it or working with the telephone company. We also provide things like e-mail and calendaring, and remote access.
What is unique about what you provide?
What typically happens is a company decides it wants to use some sales or accounting software that requires a network. The next thing they would do is hire a consultant. They would say, 'How do we build a network?' and the consultant would say, 'Pay me $18,000.' Two weeks later [the consultant would] say, 'Here's what it takes, and I'll be happy to build it for you.' By now you're out of pocket $30,000 to $50,000 and someone has to go out, buy the hardware and software to build it, configure it, install it, test it, provision the circuits from the telephone company - and now you have a network. By now you've paid $250,000 just for the privilege of multiple site connectivity. Then you have to contract with an ISP for your Internet service, then you have to hire some IT people to manage all this when he consultants leave. Systems go down, telephone lines get cut, hardware malfunctions - by the end of it you're out $250,000 and you've increased your IT staff by a couple of people. The unfortunate thing is if you're a mid-size company, you're unable to find the IT people that you need to manage the technology. If you can find them, they are very expensive people. Once you pay for them, you are lucky to keep them. Most IT people would rather work for a large company where the company is spending lots of money doing lots of cool things, or they would rather work for a technology company. An IT person working for a mid-sized company is usually temporary.
So you're saying that using an 'integrator' is not a common industry practice yet?
Absolutely not. Consultants tell you how to do it, hardware companies sell you hardware, software companies sell you software, phone companies sell you bandwidth, IT people are put on the payroll.
What's your company's current growth story?
We are moving from Fairfield to Trumbull: We're [presently] in a fairly modest facility and we're sitting on top of each other. We're moving into a 20,000-foot facility on Cambridge Drive. We have 20 employees, and we'll be in about the 35-to-40 range by the end of the year.
How much a concern is firewall protection? All companies have fire insurance, but very few actually have fires.
There is a lot more going on than you probably realize, because no one really talks about it. When [companies] get hacked, no one advertises that they got hacked. Most of the people doing the hacking aren't doing it because they're trying to steal your information. It's not industrial espionage; it tends to be people looking for open doors on the Internet to see if they can go in and wreak havoc. We get scanned, I would say, once a day by hackers. They have certain scanning software that lets them know when you're online. It lets them see if there is a way in. With the current Internet technology you're always on[line], your door is always open. While a firewall is some level of protection, hackers know that firewalls exist. It's kind of like a door lock. What we provide is a door lock with an armed guard behind it.
How do you do that?
You have to have a trained security person who understands hacking methodology and has the right tools to understand when he's being scanned, when someone is trying to get in. A firewall is a rule-set that you program up front. It is only as smart as you were the first time to program it. The alarm, if you will, is only so good; you really need a human managing it to observe behavior, to look for suspicious activity.
Is that a one-guy job or a ten-guy job?
Right now it's a two-person job. It's a 24-7 service.
That could get expensive if all companies start hiring armed guards or even if they have to pay for armed guards through companies like yours. Are we going to see more technology, or more armed guards?
I think you're going to see more services, because it is very scalable, it is economical to do it on a service basis. We effectively put all of our clients in through the same out door, [so] we just have to have one guard looking at that one door.
What about viruses
We have a security person who understands both hacking and viruses. There is virus-scanning software, but there again it's only as good as it was the last time. Hackers or virus-planters know what the software does. When the I Love You and Melissa viruses came out, a huge percentage of the Fortune 500 companies that had spent every dollar they could have on virus scanning were shut down. But it wasn't really managed by humans. A human is in the newsgroups, so he knows when a virus is coming out and that means he can take preventive measures and effectively suspend the system. You might strip out the attachments, let the e-mail through but hold off the attachments, for example, until further notice. It's managed by a human, someone who can push the red button.
What are some of the forces affecting outsourcing?
Two years ago it was okay for our computers to be down for a day. If your computers are down today, you're out of business. This is all about 100-percent up time. We live in a world where software and hardware just don't work the way other things do. If other things broke as much as our IT infrastructure, we'd go crazy. Manufacturers sell products that have bugs in them, and we need to hire people to fix the bugs.
So one of the major trends is I have to be up 100 percent of the time. Is that just true in the middle market and above?
I think it's becoming true [universally]. Even if you just think about e-mail, e-mail contracts, proposals. From a percentage point of view, a smaller company may have more of a problem. But it ultimately is a function of the type of business: The more complex a company, the bigger the company, the more it needs to communicate with itself.
To sum things up, what are the forces that will propel outsourcing of IT services and functions?
There are really three issues. The biggest is shortage of IT people. It is very hard to find them; they tend to go to very large companies where they can paid very well or to technology companies and do fun things and be part of something. Being a technology person for a mid-sized company, if you have a choice, is not where you want to be.
The next thing is technology obsolescence. The most expensive thing you can do with technology is to change it. Unless you're an expert, you don't want to be in the business of buying technology if you can avoid it. If you can rent it as a service - and the obsolescence is someone else's problem - than that's in your best interest.
The third is the concept of 100-percent uptime.
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