Easy Access Consulting has been providing computer support for all sorts of individuals and organisations for the last five and a half years.

Easy Access Consulting director Sean Soares explained that in November they would have been in business for six years.

“Basically we offer IT support, operations, help desk, from the home user up to the big business and pretty much everyone in between,” he said.

They now have a new location on North Shore Road, Pembroke.

“We just opened an office. We didn’t have an office before. All of our services were remote, emails, voicemail and PDA, as long as we had the Internet, that was it.”

“The other notable point is that we now have a staff of five, so we needed a permanent home.

“It is only 11 minutes away from town, so it is a nice little base for us.”

Before venturing out on their own, Mr. Soares and his partner Robert Rego worked in the information technology field for about a decade.

“We were both in the field for at least ten years and it is probably closer to 15 now,” he said. “We worked with other local IT firms.”

Asked why did they go out on their own, Mr. Soares said: “I was working for one of the reinsurance companies and I was up for a change at that point and we had discussed this idea a couple of years prior to that.

“I had taken a month’s vacation prior to starting another job with an IT consulting firm. I remember sitting on a beach in Portugal and thinking, ‘why am I going to go and work for someone else’?

“I came back, Robert was on board with it and basically we started it. We had had a lot of discussions, but nothing had been put into motion up until that point.”

The company is flexible and can tailor solutions to what their clients need, he said.

“We set up systems, they can come to us and we can advice them as to what’s a good system,” he said. “We work a lot with the local vendors or we also bring in equipment from overseas as well.

“It depends on what they want, but we are always looking for the most cost effective means for the client.”

Easy Access has installed a new help desk aimed at making their business more efficient.

“We just put in a new help desk system in place, which is fully automated and clients can either leave voicemail messages for us or contact us by e-mail,” he said.

“It instantly notifies the team and they will know about the full status and when someone has taken the call. “It is a good tool, because we can also pull up call details and through the Internet I can just pull up whatever I need. We have a four hour response time.”

Another new feature is that they now have the ability to remotely monitor a server.

“If any errors happen on the back ups or things like that, the team gets an e-mail and we take action on it. We become their helpdesk rather than them having to hire a full time person.

“With the remote monitoring, we can now see if the computers are running efficiently and it is like a dashboard that comes up of each of the clients and it is pretty good.

“You find that a lot of their companies are outsourcing their help desks to Canada and places like that, but we are trying to keep stuff local.”

If they are dealing with a start up company or an organisation that needs its system upgraded, Mr. Soares said: “The main question that we have is, ‘What do you want your equipment to do?’

“It is not just a matter of putting in a computer system or a network; you have to keep in mind how they want to work with it.

“So you go and spec out the site, find out the first thing that we would do is figure out how they want to use it, it is not just about putting in a server and some computers.”

They have also set up a business blog and an alert service on the website.

“We’ll e-mail you when something new comes up,” he said.

“And what we have done in the past is when a high alert for a virus or something comes up then we notify the customer base via e-mail.”

Asked if it is better to store data automatically on the server or is it better to store information on the hard drive, Mr. Soares replied: “Typically not, you have all of your data in a centralised location and then back up from there.”

Easy Access Consulting Ltd. has also become local providers of specialised software.

“For instance Quick Books, which is an accounting package, we have taken on that,” he said.

“We just became resellers for the Help Desk (IE Support Manager) — we liked it so much that we decided that we would start spreading it around and we have had a couple of people who have taken that on.

“It is easy to use, it is low cost, it is easy to maintain, and it is for unlimited users. People think that the whole Help Desk thing is for IT consultants, but if you think about it anyone who does any sort of service can make use of it.”For more information visit www.eacbda.com