Small Business Q&A: Bob Murray from Evros Technology

In this week’s small business Q&A, Kehlan talks with Bob Murray from Evros Technology. Evros has a 25-year history in IT and computer solutions for business. Bob talks to Kehlan about how it started and how the business has evolved.    

What does Evros Technology do?

Evros technology is 25 years old now, and for that time we’ve been providing services to people who need IT systems within their businesses. If I boiled it down to a basic level I’d say that we are the people who keep the lights on within your computer systems. Twenty-five years ago we would have started out as a break/fix type organisation. Fixing systems that would go down was the main essence of our business. From there we brought this ethos in that as a company we should try and stay two or three steps ahead of what our customers needed. So it’s endemic on us to always be in touch with the latest technology, so that we can help to make the lives of our customers a little easier.

You must have seen a lot of changes in that time?

A long time ago when I started everybody had these big computer rooms where people would keep their IT processing units. Then we saw the power of computing shift to the desktop where people had powerful towers and laptops to drive their system. Now we’re seeing that shift back to central systems via the likes of cloud computing and data warehouses. So we’ve seen a lot of change, but we’ve been able to move with that change and our customers have had the benefit of that.

So what does the cloud offer that other business systems don’t?

We’ve invested a lot of money over the past few years for building out our own cloud systems for clients. So our clients use our cloud infrastructure as part of their business. We’ve branded this Digital Planet. So effectively what’s happening is that they can relieve themselves of the operations of running their systems 24/7. That responsibility then becomes ours and they are free to use the system, but no longer have to maintain the system. It also allows us the ability to monitor the system all the time and keep our maintenance logs, instead of having to play catch up if we needed to come into a business and check their system. Twenty years ago we would have had most of our engineers out on the road checking and maintaining systems with barely any of them in the office. Nowadays that has reversed with the need of only a small number of engineers on the road and most in office.

So do you offer subscription services to clients for the use of the system?

We tailor a lot of things that we offer to the customer. We’re are no longer a break/fix business, we offer a whole host of different applications to our customers. We can provide to clients through our It resource division, we can provide clients with short term contractors. If they have somebody going on maternity leave or of on a long holiday, we can provide somebody to that business who can help keep them ticking over. We are now seeing more and more people work from home as well. We’re providing companies and people with the solutions to do that. You no longer need to be in an office to work efficiently, so we provide the service to help them do that.

For more information go to www.evros.ie