[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Deric Curtis. My title is senior IT solutions analyst. I work for a company out of Grand Rapids, Michigan called Fishbeck. Our company started growing, and we weren't being able to maintain the level of support that we primarily are used to using and not have to hire 20 new IT staff.
My company really pride themselves on being able to make sure that our staff focus on their profession and allow the IT and our support staff to be able to keep them going. And without having some next level solution, we weren't going to be able to maintain that level of support.
So we did look at multiple other titles. One of our issues we ran into is we needed our system to be very user friendly for my technicians on a day-to-day basis. A lot of the different ones we were looking at worked really well on the imaging side, but when it came to desktop support or help desk end of things, it was very old fashioned. It was not very customizable, or it was too customizable.
So after going through the demo with KACE, a colleague and I ended up spending a solid week of they allowed us to just work on that. And we presented something, and the company didn't even bat an eye at the cost. They're like the benefits way outweigh the cost on the whole end.
We chose KACE because it ended up allowing us to crosswork between different parts of the IT department. From our imaging solution to our day-to-day ticketing to our automation, it all kind of tied in under one house.
KACE met our business needs a little bit above what our expectations were. Our automation not only allowed us to be able to streamline and speed up our IT processes, but at this point, we're actually starting to empower our staff to be able to do some of the IT work.
My personal triumph from using the KACE Solutions has to be upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. We did an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, and it took us seven to eight months to do so. It took myself and three other technicians working all the time. We were after hours, before hours all the time working on these machines. When we went and did it with KACE, we ended up utilizing a series of scripting inside of the script module, and by myself over the course of six weeks managed to migrate over 400 machines from Windows 7 to Windows 10 with minimal downtime.
My work-life balance has been amazing since we've gotten into the KACE. Since we've gotten the automation worked out and upgrades and one thing or another, I now set an upgrade and tell it to go at 11 PM or 2 AM and then I just check it in the morning. There's no more of these all-night upgrade endeavors where you're remoting into a machine and hitting Install and you're going through all of this. It ended up working out that I now am able to engage in other activities around the house and do a lot more because of the free time I've gotten.
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