Realnets

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of DLS Internet Services

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

DLS Internet provides Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Realnets to accomplish?

• Network Support end Engineering Services
• Cloud Hosting

SOLUTION

How did you find Realnets?

Referral

Why did you select Realnets over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Realnets were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Designed, provisioned, and provided a hosted virtual platform for our internal systems. Supplied and supported Microsoft products and licenses for DLS.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

System port time, stability and uptime. Uptime for our databases and billing environment was of special concern.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Our project was managed well. We had an initial kick-off meeting where our plan and timeline were put together. Our engineer worked with their design team to help provision the environment and schedule migration from our on-site servers. The engineer was always available to us over SMS and Phone. We also conducted a number of virtual meetings via the DLS meeting room. Transition preparation and staging setup took about 2 months but it was worth the wait to make sure things were well coordinated.

What was your primary form of communication with Realnets?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Availability and a strong commitment to customer support. They really treated our tasks and concerns in a meaningful way.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Realnets could have done differently?

Some of the meetings could have been held virtually but they preferred face-to-face meetings. But it was nice to have someone overcommunicate as opposed to undercommunicate.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive of Home Source Corporation

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a disaster relief company who finds temporary housing for companies who lose their home in an emergency situation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Realnets to accomplish?

• Host my environment
• provide security
• streamline my process

SOLUTION

How did you find Realnets?

Online Search

Why did you select Realnets over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Realnets were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

They host our environment on a secure network, allow for VPN and on boarding of new employees to streamline our systems. They provide Help desk and network support for our entire organization.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

I no longer have to do anything IT related for our company. If I need computers, monitors, etc. I simply call Realnets and they take care of our every demand.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They followed through even if things were on backorder, I was made aware. The projects were complete even if it meant one of their staff stayed and worked through an entire weekend.

What was your primary form of communication with Realnets?

Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The owner is honest and customer-centric. He hires people that are a mirror image of that same vaule system. If there is a problem, he has folks that focus on results that don't always benefit the company but often times the client.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Realnets could have done differently?

They can hire more folks like Tyler who is a complete professional. I am impressed by his knowledge and thought twice about writing this as we need him to be our righthand person and don't want everyone to request him.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Principal of St. Emily School

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Catholic Elementary School

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Realnets to accomplish?

Install a new CCTV system in order to improve school security.

SOLUTION

How did you find Realnets?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Realnets over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fits our budget
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Realnets were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Installation of new Hanwha Wisenet CCTV System
• Install 13 new Wisenet cameras
• Install factory-refreshed personal computer (PC) / network video recorder (NVR)
• Setup recording / and screens
• Install 3 new Mikrotek power over ethernet (PoE) + Switches
• Setup fiber cross connects
• Work with IT to integrate into the firewall

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Secure the safety of the school community. 
• Monitor all entrances, parking lots, and playgrounds. 
• Limit access to the school building.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Realnets listened to our needs and presented a proposal that thoroughly addressed our safety concerns. Once the equipment was installed, they provided personal training so that we could maximize the many features of our new security system. They continue to address our questions, and the service is prompt and professional. The techs were courteous and friendly, and you could tell they took great pride in their work.

What was your primary form of communication with Realnets?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I'm delighted with their exceptional work quality, and I feel my school is very safe due to their services and obvious expertise in this area.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Realnets could have done differently?

No - I am completely satisfied.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO for Agentis, and we’re developing a SaaS platform for utility providers to service their commercial and industrial customers. 

Our app provides data visualization of energy usage using inputs from smart meters across the country. We present that to business customers through utility websites and portals. Additionally, we analyze energy data to help identify efficiency programs and cost-saving measures.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Realnets?

We needed support for our various IT projects over the years.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Realnets has done a lot for our company through the years, starting from the early days when we’ve had on-premise servers in a closet. First, they helped us configure a VPN to allow our employees to access our servers remotely. They set up an OpenVPN, and they showed us how to add users and monitor our account. 

The relationship grew from there. A few years later, Realnets helped us migrate our on-premise and Rackspace servers into an AWS cloud infrastructure. They were instrumental in getting all our services, systems, and applications into the cloud. 

Realnets also helped us establish our first corporate security policies and prepare them for our Service Organizational Control (SOC) 2 Type 2 accreditation. They helped us figure out backup policies, disaster recovery procedures, and business continuity plans. They also did our patch management until an internal teammate took over. 

Most recently, we’ve been engaging Realnets for quarterly risk assessments. They’ve supported our security team, and they bring industry best practices to our company.

What is the team composition?

Brian (Founder) is our primary contact, and we’ve worked with three other teammates.

How did you come to work with Realnets?

We found them through a Google search. We talked to various managed service providers (MSP), and we were looking for someone to do our VPN. We didn’t get much excitement from other vendors, but Realnets displayed enthusiasm for whatever project we had, so we hired them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in November 2012, and it’s ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Our VPN server has been running smoothly, thanks to Realnets. Additionally, their cloud migration work has received positive feedback from end users. Everything is running stable and as expected. 

As our company has grown, we’ve continued using AWS patterns that Realnets has helped us establish. This includes network naming conventions, server configurations, and other things. 

How did Majestic perform from a project management standpoint?

Realnets is very responsive whenever we encounter issues or need assistance when adding new users or resetting passwords.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The flexibility and adaptability of Realnets’ team in working with us from when we had 5–7 employees up to now that we have 35–40 are impressive. They’ve been able to scale from a small VPN project to something as large as a multi-region AWS cloud integration.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything. We’ve had good experiences with everything we’ve asked them to do.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that you have a clear plan and end goal in mind, including a target end date and measures for success.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re focused on distributing metal doors and frames and hardware to contractors for commercial construction projects. I’m the executive VP general manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Realnets?

We hired them to upgrade and manage our IT infrastructure network.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

When we first hired them, they conducted a complete audit of the health and security of our current network. That included work stations, switches, routers, and other IT aspects of our company. From there, they made recommendations for security enhancements and laid out a plan for requiring upgrades over the coming years. 

Since that time, we’ve worked hand in hand to monitor and implement that initial plan through regular security audits and upgrades. They continue to manage the day to day requirements of our network, making changes, monitoring plans, and addressing threats.   

How did you come to work with Realnets?

They were referred to us by one of our clients.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in late 2017, and our work is ongoing.  

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Particularly because we came from having a reactive provider that was always reacting to the events of the day, it was fantastic to have a very proactive partner. Now, we able to address things before they become real threats. When we’ve had issues, they call us to inform about potential issues and what we can do to address the problem. They’re monitoring our operations from the backend, allowing them to address issues before they hit our purview.  

How did Realnets perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve helped us to prioritize what must be done compared to what should be handled. While establishing budgets, they’ve kept all of their work within bounds of our budget. They’ve done a nice job of identifying where we need to spend money and where we don’t. Their team uses a ticketing system and portal to communicate with our team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They bring our team a sense of security because someone is watching our network. I can come to work confident in our systems and my team’s ability to work without having to deal with security threats. The best thing they’re providing me is peace of mind. We know they’re able to mitigate issues. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything at the moment.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust their advice when they give it. They’re experts in this industry, so their advice can and should be trusted.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I Manage a nonprofit service office here in chicago that service all of Cook County

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Realnets?

We need to migrate an old Drupal website to WordPress, while also coding NaviCat to work with new site, though the database was still old and not all functions/fields were parallel anymore either

What were your goals for this project?

Old datadase information to populate need website interface, also moving content from Drupal to Wordpress, as well as changing hosting platforms

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had worked with this vendor on an unrelated projected, so we asked them to prove an estimate and timeline. We were planning on getting other bids, however after reviewing the timeline and detail that they provided for their exceptions, we proceed based on previous experience and ease of working with the company. Plus the few other vendors I had a phone call with had mentioned a month to complete

Describe the project in detail.

I have a committee that handle most of the redesign of the site, RealNets came in to get all the working pieces to come together and form a working product. The coding and remapping of the NaviCat API to the database was done quickly and tested throughly. We ran into unforseen issues moving website itself from the server it was being hosted on, to the new hosting site. Realnets was able to locate the issue and reduce my downtime to minutes. The hiccup was on our server hosting, not on there work to move the site and launch it.

What was the team composition?

At first we had a project manager and 3 support members, however after realizing issues when on the live site, they used two others to audit the site for an not glaring hiccups since site was only tested on the server hosting and not same enivoriment.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We had an extra week of testing/auditing the new site as a procaution. We had to make a few changes to how data filters to the website and forms work to volunteers. However the whole project was complete in a matter of weeks.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They use a ticketing system that allows to see everyones response and actions taken to reslove, which I believe helps keep the project moving. Therefore, I'm keep in the loop along the way. .

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Communication was very fuild as well with all memebrs of the team, not just the project manager. They take pride in their work. They seemed to understand the urgency of our website compared to others, at least that is how they made us feel. The also circle back to see what feedback we received and looked to address the issues, even after they had been paid.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, if a member of the team could not address a question that arised, someone would reach out within an hour to let me know they were addressing or looking into the new item on the table. They work as a team, so you get the support of all their expertise.I will work with them again.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CFO for a real estate company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Realnets?

As a relatively young company, we needed help with our corporate level IT solution from the beginning. We also needed help with our property developments when it comes to installing and managing the IT infrastructure at the multi-family properties.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We invest and manage a multi-family apartment complex, usually around 100 units per building on average. We have 1,000 apartment units in the portfolio to date. Realnets has helped build out the entire network infrastructure at the properties themselves and installed the network, the switches, the firewalls. They run cables to each unit. They provision the network so that we can shape it how we need it for the individual units.

 They’ve also helped when it comes to setting up offices at those properties for the property managers themselves and distinguishing between a tenant network and the management network. They also help with things like security cameras, door securities, television displays, and a whole gamut of IT related items. They also provide IT support for the tenants. In their move-in packet, we tell the tenants if they have any issues with the internet or IT questions, they can call Realnets.

We’re in the process right now of deploying an active directory. We grew so quick and added so many people and there were all these computers all over the place that we kind of lost track of them really quick. We’ve been deploying this active directory to bring those all back under our management along with that exercise with cleaning up things like the printer network, the WIFI network, and putting into place Microsoft Teams and SharePoint so that we could better coordinate internally with each other.

What is the team composition?

I regularly interact with 3-4 people for different aspects of what they’re doing. There are probably more employees involved with our operation as well.

How did you come to work with Realnets?

The owner of our company had known the founder of Realnets since they were in high school. He had done work with them at his prior company and continued that relationship with this new company.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested $1 million - $10 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in November 2015 and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They built out the tenant network for over 1,000 apartment units in the Chicago and Milwaukee region and helped deploy and manage work stations for over 30 employees. They set up two corporate level offices and multiple property management offices with things like monitors, printers, computers, the active directory server, etc. I’m satisfied with their services. They’re instrumental to our success.

How did Realnets perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is good. They’ve done some shuffling of people so that they could better address specific needs. Everybody was growing and evolving so quick and they recognized the need to have people solely dedicated to certain buckets as opposed to people trying to do a little bit of a lot of different things. That’s definitely helped. We communicate via phone, in-person, and email. Apartment tenants can send them tickets or call them. They handle that whole side of it. We have a master service agreement with them for the properties to handle all tenant related network questions.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve done an outstanding job at the property development level when it came to building out the networks at an extremely reasonable cost. It was no headache to us. We gave them our goal and checked back when the project was done and the systems were up and running.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They do a good job of it, but they could do even better with providing alternative solutions and cool ideas rather than just taking what we say we want.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Lane Technical Sales is primarily a LED lighting manufacturing company. We also do custom products and import/export from China and overseas. I manage some of the financial background operations as well as basic website and communications about our network issues with Realnets.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Realnets?

We use them to host our network as well as maintain all of our websites. We recently broke into online sales selling on Amazon and through our own product websites. They’ve been instrumental in getting that up and bringing us into that space.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Realnets did everything from the ground up. We told them that we wanted to be able to sell things online. They built the site in order for us to do that and they continue to create content and raise our presence online. They maintain the website so we don’t have to.

How did you come to work with Realnets?

They’re a local company. The owner of our company knew Brian Schoen from a previous office building, and we kept the relationship going.

How much have you invested with Realnets?

We pay them between $5000 and $7000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked with them on various products for ten years, and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How did Realnets perform from a project management standpoint?

Initially, they were somewhat slow to respond to some things, but they’ve improved over the past six to eight months. They keep us updated on issues we’ve had. Previously we had to keep asking them why we were having a network issue or why something wasn’t updated, but the communication has gotten better.

What did you find most impressive about Realnets?

They are very personable and knowledgeable. We come in with big ideas and have no idea how feasible something is from a technical standpoint. They’re good at walking us through the process and presenting multiple options for how to move forward with something instead of telling us what we should do. They let us make the decision but provide us the information we need to do so.

Are there any areas Realnets could improve?

Communication is the biggest thing. In the past six months, they’ve moved over to a new customer management system, and that’s been helpful for us.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the chief executive officer of ADM Diagnostics. Our business is very computing-intensive. We analyze brain images to help pharmaceutical companies understand whether the drugs they’re developing are getting into the brain and whether they’re having the targeted effect on diseases such as Alzheimer’s. We’re also using our multi-variant machine-learning pattern recognition software to develop diagnostic tools that can be used by clinicians to analyze brain scans. These solutions help people determine whether they have Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia.

We have a unique system on a Linux-based server. It’s not just a plug-and-play Windows operating system. We also use some remote access to our Linux server, with a remote PC configuration.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Realnets?

For us, it’s critical to have a reliable provider of data services, IT, data storage, and backup. We needed a new place to house our server. We also needed to have a flexible capacity for computation. There are times when we need massively parallel computations and analyses on different brain images. However, there are other times when we don’t need quite that much computing.  

At one point, we had an internal IT person, but that person went to a different company. So, we were really looking for a vendor that could provide seamless IT expertise, as if they were a part of our team. When we needed expertise in Linux or Windows or data storage, we wanted to feel that we had that resource.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Realnets is hosting our server and providing flexible computing capacity. They offered us several options such as porting our network-attached storage over to their place and using their available server capacity. Realnets helped us determine how much cloud we should use and how much we should have running on an ongoing basis. We also figured out what it would take to implement the required documentation for our regulatory requirements.

They’ve done a lot of work in analyzing and configuring the architecture of the proposed system. Realnets help us work with different operating systems, including Linux. Going forward, they will be managing our server, which will actually be their server. They will continue to handle our network-attached storage, which we will migrate to their data center.

How did you come to work with Realnets?

I was fortunate when I did a Google search — it can be a hit or miss. They may have done a good job at making sure their site came up, but I can’t remember the keywords I used. It might have been “IT support” or “data center.” We are located in Northbrook, Illinois, so I was also looking for a company that would be local to the Chicago area.  Another consideration was whether they had the ability to support our growth needs, as we do anticipate growth, and we felt that they did.

How much have you invested with Realnets?

We would be among their smaller customers.

What is the status of this engagement?

The initial project started in March and ended in April of 2017. We are still working with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

They have done a tremendous amount of work in assessing our computing needs. They were extremely patient and creative in identifying different combinations and options that would work for us.

What did you find most impressive about Realnets?

We’ve worked with several potential vendors who were all given the same question and set of issues or needs. Realnets is unique because of the level of expertise and customer focus that they have. Their technical people were responsive in setting aside time to meet with us. When we had a question on our network-attached storage, they were very quick to respond. They offered to have a tech come pick it up and try to extract data for us.

Are there any areas Realnets could improve?

At this point, I would say no.