Ted Garner, the co-founder of IT Weapons along with Jason MacBean, called his company’s victory as Solution Provider of the Year at the CDN Channel Elite Awards a “fantastic honour for two guys who started the company at a coffee shop (Tim Horton’s) 10 years ago.”
The Solution Provider of the Year must demonstrate that they provided a total end-to-end IT solution that solved a major problem or eliminated many IT pain points for the customer during the year 2009. The singular award goes to the channel partner that has shown an outstanding body of work through the year.
IT Weapons of Brampton, Ont., displayed its resilience over the course of two Channel Elite Awards. The firm, a Cisco channel partner had to settle for three second place finishes. But IT Weapons took many of its second place finishes from last year’s Channel Elite Awards as extra motivation. Instead of pondering on the near misses they became determined to provide more winning solutions for their customers.
Garner told CDN that last year the company did a low five instead of a high five after the Channel Elite Awards. He said that he gathered everyone up and asked them to focus on delivering new and better solutions and made to remind everyone that they were for the Channel Elite Awards. “The solutions got bigger and they got sexier and everyone took a lot of pride to deliver excellence,” he added.
One of the company’s mottos that company has is “We don’t sell products, we solve problems!”
“About 10 years we had this vision of helping customers feel safe about their IT and now we have 45 people on staff with the same mission and they are dedicated to keeping customers safe. It’s a great feeling,” Garner said.
To continue to keep customers safe, the company had to move out of its home that was becoming too antiquated and into a new stat of the art facility.
The facility is able to take care of a diverse range of customers from small not-for-profit organizations, to nation-wide commercial real estate firms, financial organizations, critical care organizations and even an ambulatory patient transfer organization called Ornge. The solution for Ornge put a multi-billion dollar asset firm and a critical ambulatory care organization under its care. The responsibility can be overwhelming. Another one of this company’s mottos is to “measure twice, cut once.” They used this approach for IRC Building Sciences Group, a Mississauga, Ontario-based structural engineering firm. They build a centralized IT system in the cloud with secure remote access that could accommodate workforce displacement in case of a disaster.By empowering its employee base to become experts in many areas of IT and for taking the risks on cloud computing and brand new facility they are CDN’s Solution Provider of the Year. Garner said: “We got six out of six of what we wanted to win in the Channel Elite Awards and everyone in the company is stoked and we are going to have one big party.”
