Editorial
Front Page - Friday, January 15, 2010
Microsoft Gold certified company provides quality IT solutions
Stephanie Coward
In a converted warehouse on Market Street, there are offices staffed with people whose jobs are to ensure a business has all its technological needs in check. From accounting software platforms, application and software development and Web design, there is little technology out there a business could need that SRC couldn’t provide.
SRC began as a small accounting software development department within the Henderson, Hutcherson and McCullough public accounting firm offices and it branched out around 10 years ago, according to Managing Partner Joe Alegre. “They had internal support staff, they had clients who had needs, it sort of evolved … and then along the way we wound up just sort of doing our own thing,” Alegre said
Alegre merged his web design company with SRC. He had owned his company for about five years and knew a few people at SRC. “We decided that it might be better for me to come here and basically bring my block of business with me so that they could extend out,” Alegre said. “I started where I was just doing the Web part of the business.”
Today, Alegre is one of three partners, but he manages the group, he said. “Everybody basically reports up through me here.”
SRC is composed of three departments: IT services; Web development and accounting software.
The IT services group takes care of computer networking and network security. “The IT service group is probably the most mature of the groups. We’ve been doing that for all 10 years that we’ve been doing this,” Alegre said. “As far as the IT service business, just like anything in our business, it sort of evolves, ya know, where 10 years ago Internet was a sort of necessary but not as much so as it is now; the whole business model has changed.” Prior to the technological boom, Alegre said everything was mainly reliant on physical machines, but now the business model is shifting and virtualization and cloud computing are becoming more prevalent.
Web development encompasses application development, Web design and anything else that is dot-net related, according to Alegre. “The application development group – that part of the business has actually steadily been growing,” he said. There are a few reasons Alegre cites for the growth. One is the products the company works with. A lot of work is done for Sierra Image and Sharepoint, which are both Microsoft products. “But they’re both products that allow you to develop in them and extend them out however you see fit. So we’re seeing a lot of work in those areas.”
There isn’t really anything that Alegre or the SRC team cannot do. “Our nature is to say ‘yes we can, to everything, because we can; but it’s more a question of does it make sense and is it worth doing these things?” Alegre said. “And what you find when you get into applications like Sierra M and Sharepoint, as an example, is that they already have a base of functionality in them … The thing that’s nice with those is that without us even having to touch or do anything, there’s a certain sort of guideline of things you get with it. It also sets us down a path of us knowing what it can or can’t do.” Because of that, Alegre said there is a solid foundational basis that SRC is able to build upon.
The accounting software section of SRC is all about precision. “We have a few consultants and they are specific to their software that they support,” Alegre said. “Obviously any business out there, any business, has some sort of accounting software that they need to run their business.”
Though SRC remains connected to Henderson, Hutcherson and McCullough, both provide different services. “The accounting software is more for the client to keep up with their financials internally. What the firm is doing more is looking at that financial information, making assessments, recommendations, processing that information to do something with it,” Alegre said. “But still the day-to-day stuff that goes on in inputting all that data and information is largely done out of one of these accounting software packages.”
SRC is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, which means they have “a certain amount of certified professionals within a series of Microsoft technologies like their server platforms, the application development stuff or the operating systems for desktops,” Alegre said. “We’ve been gold certified for at least six or seven years now consecutive, so there’s a certain level. It’s great for us in the sense that businesses are looking for technical experts in what it is they need us to support, so having those certifications is very important for us to basically give the client the comfort level that we know what we’re doing and we can support their business. That’s a big part of our model is that we’re largely a Microsoft shop.”
More can be learned about SRC’s services by visiting the company’s Web site at www.srcnetworking.com.
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