ENDICOTT — Growth is the name of the game in 2013 at IT service and support provider ICS Solutions Group, which has seen its revenue jump just over the past few months and now needs to add employees to keep up with the demand. ICS President Kevin Blake attributes the growth to several factors, […]
ENDICOTT — Growth is the name of the game in 2013 at IT service and support provider ICS Solutions Group, which has seen its revenue jump just over the past few months and now needs to add employees to keep up with the demand.
ICS President Kevin Blake attributes the growth to several factors, the first of which is the still-struggling economy. “When the economy goes down, people outsource,” he says. He declined to share specific revenue numbers for ICS but says a good portion of the growth stems from companies spending their IT dollars more wisely. For some, that might mean doing away with an internal IT department and completely outsourcing it. For others, it means contracting with a company for special projects or other needs that its own IT department cannot handle.
ICS has also generated growth from an array of new offerings, including a help desk service it now offers to business clients and local governments, says Travis Hayes, chief technology officer. Over the years, ICS has invested a lot of time and money into perfecting its own help desk system, he says. It just made sense to start offering that system to clients in need.
So far, a number of local governments, including Tioga County, are using ICS’s help desk system with great success, he notes. It gives clients an internal help desk ticketing system so end users can submit a ticket when they have an IT issue, and also provides an array of metrics that help clients see where they spending their IT time and how to make improvements, Hayes says.
ICS has averaged annual sales growth of 25 percent from year to year, a trend Blake expects to continue and the main reason ICS needs to hire new employees as soon as it can find qualified candidates. “We’re walking away from deals right now because we can’t meet demand,” he says.
As a result, ICS currently needs to hire between three and five new employees — both level 1 help desk employees and level 3 engineers — adding to its current staff of 53 to meet current and future demand. “We’re looking for a mix of people,” Hayes says. Potential candidates need to be tech savvy, but also need to be “warm and fuzzy” and able to interact with customers in a personable way, he says. That friendly approach is another key to ICS’s success, Blake says.
Other services ICS offers include disaster prevention, data recovery, off-site backup, network services, and could services.
Blake and Travis, who purchased ICS in 2005, expect additional growth at the company to come from a mix of expanded services with existing clients, adding new clients, and even from acquiring other companies. That strategy served the company well in 2010 when it acquired Microtech Computer Center, expanding ICS’s reach into the Syracuse market.
Headquartered at 111 Grant St. in Endicott, ICS (www.icsnewyork.com) also has an office at 2518 Erie Blvd. E. in Syracuse and serves clients in Binghamton, Elmira, Oneonta, Syracuse, Ithaca, Rochester, northern New York, and northeastern Pennsylvania.
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