Last Updated on Friday, 10 July, 2020 at 1:33 pm by Andre Camilleri
Pandemic exposed companies who were not IT ready
The COVID19 pandemic exposed many Maltese companies, especially SME’s, who still did not appreciate the extent to which IT and cloud computing can help them drive their business to success when applying automation.
According to a Eurostat survey published in 2018, 37% of Maltese companies were adopting cloud computing, placing Malta at the ninth place amongst all EU countries.
“When the pandemic broke, those who had invested in the right technology, especially cloud technology, saw their productivity remain unchanged because they found themselves with a huge big competitive advantage because they were in a position to adapt to the new situation much faster,” says Eyetech Ltd.’s Managing Director Patrick Cutajar.
IT services company Eyetech Ltd spent the past four years pushing its customers to move to Microsoft’s cloud solutions.
“This experience taught us that notwithstanding many companies want to be ready for any eventuality, there were many others who suddenly found themselves struggling to adapt to the effects of the pandemic. In fact, COVID also helped us decide that offering cloud solutions for SME’s will be our company’s strategic direction in the coming months,” added Mr Cutajar.
Eyetech Ltd was founded in 2002 to provide IT services to clients in different vertical markets from on-premise setup of infrastructure, networks and hardware installation, configurations and setup of servers and computers including operating systems.
Other services include managed network routers and switches, backup and disaster recovery solutions, security, and monitoring services together with a vast range of services available on the cloud mostly provided by Microsoft like Microsoft 365 and Azure.
In 2017, Eyetech Ltd won the much-coveted Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for Malta for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.
“With this achievement, Eyetech’ s clients where more assured that they were being served by a company familiar with Microsoft’s cutting edge technology and nowadays, when we are introduced to new clients, they come with a sense of trust in our work. In fact, I would say the biggest achievement in the past 3 years was the move of most of our clients to the cloud, especially Office 365, where we are one of the leaders in this sector,” added Patrick Cutajar.
Mr Cutajar explained how during the pandemic, online services saw a drastic increase in usage.
“Since we had pushed the use of Cloud services with our customers, most of them were already prepared to work remotely through teleworking. Other non-prepared customers, like those who had to deliver products to their customers, had to adapt to the new change by starting to accept orders via limited technologies like WhatsApp or Messenger but their administration set-ups were overwhelmed by the amount of manual work they had to do to serve customers, and consequently, retain them.”
Remaining competitive in this sector is highly difficult but the positive outcomes for our customers during these past challenging months defined Eyetech’s strength as a catalyst in pushing customers to incorporate digital technology in their business processes.
“Another factor that defines us is our ability to bring technology that is usually provided to and associated with large companies, to the SME sector. Understanding how SME’s think also helps us provide solutions that meet the budget for each client where this would vary depending on the sector the SME operates in,” he added.
Currently Eyetech is migrating several of its clients to Microsoft Azure, a platform that hosts all sort of cloud services, from basic websites, virtual servers, and firewalls, to hosted databases, online apps, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence.
“We are also helping them reduce costs especially those related to licenses and services while providing them with training on products that will help them achieve more in a remote environment, like remote meeting solutions, solutions that were rejected in the past but which are now in very high demand.”
“Our strategic direction will continue to be the original one, that of being the IT administrator for those companies who want to deliver true digital transformation,” concluded Patrick Cutajar.
