Mayor gets inside story on Secure Future Tech Solutions

Ryan Murray
Posted 7/24/14

Scott Avedisian is accustomed to being watched. That’s part of his job as mayor.

But on a recent “business one-on-one” tour where the mayor and staff from economic development and tourism …

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Mayor gets inside story on Secure Future Tech Solutions

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Scott Avedisian is accustomed to being watched. That’s part of his job as mayor.

But on a recent “business one-on-one” tour where the mayor and staff from economic development and tourism visit local businesses, the mayor and the touring officials went behind the security cameras. They also got to see the inner workings of a company that provides technology solutions to many small businesses and they learned how Warwick’s location could be critical to a company’s growth.

When Secure Future Tech Solutions moved to Warwick eight years ago, they occupied a small section of a business plaza at 110 Jefferson Boulevard. Recently the company expanded to two more suites, one on each side, allowing them to offer more technology to their corporate clients.

Lisa Shorr, vice president of marketing of Secure Future Tech Solutions, said that Jefferson Boulevard is a great location and that the company moved to Warwick because the taxes are less and because it was central in the state. 

Shorr said that moving to Warwick helped the company serve clients from South County. 

“South County didn’t want to work with us because we were a Providence business,” Shorr said. After the move, those South County clients were very happy. “It was a very good move.”

Shorr said Secure Future Tech Solutions has eight trucks on the road and the new location makes it easy to get anywhere in Rhode Island.

“Being on Jefferson Boulevard makes it very easy for our trucks to go in and out,” Shorr said.

The Jefferson Boulevard location provides the company with a great parking lot compared to Providence, where it’s much more challenging to find parking, she added.

Lisa’s husband Eric Shorr is president and CEO of Secure Future Tech Solutions.

The company is very involved with their clients and when contracted, Lisa said, Eric will learn the business.

“Eric goes to the business and looks at the technology they are using: printers, copiers, scanners, software packages, whatever they use to run their business,” Lisa Shorr said. “Eric will recommend the best technology solution to help their company grow. “

Lisa Shorr said that Secure Future Tech Solutions has a “very keen understanding of the small business.” 

“We spent the past 22 years building relationships and learning the needs of a small business,” she said.

Eric Shorr founded Secure Future Tech Solutions in 1992 as a junior at the University of Rhode Island. Back then it was called PC Troubleshooters and if an individual’s computer was broken, Eric would fix it.

Now the company focuses on small businesses and physical and network security, including network video surveillance solutions, data backup and disaster recovery solutions, network and email security, access control and numerous other cloud offerings.

“The key here is that we’re providing enterprise technology but on a level that our small business clients can afford,” Eric Shorr told the mayor. “So it levels the playing field because a small business can have access to the same kind of technology a very big business has or maybe a city or town or whoever.”

The access control the company offers businesses for security purposes uses two-factor authentication. First you need to insert a key, but then you also are required to enter a code. This method is known as “chip and pin.”

Tim Waugh, senior sales engineer, has been working for Secure Future Tech Solutions for more than a decade. Waugh is the company’s inside “sales extraordinaire.” He started with the company at their Providence location as an intern.

“Since then he has evolved into this very intelligent, very detail-oriented engineer that helps Eric put quotes together, build systems; he and Eric will go on site, figure out what a client needs,” Lisa Shorr said.

Waugh graduated in 2003 from New England Tech.

Eric Shorr and Waugh make a great team. Eric will go out in the field and talk to clients and come back with their needs and Tim puts them all together. They created a shop on-site and a lot of computers come in on a daily basis.

“Some have viruses, malware, some are new computers that we are setting up to go out the door,” Eric Shorr said.

During its 22-year existence, Secure Future Tech Solutions has developed a sub-network of contractors. Shorr said the company has great relationships with other vendors and that if there is something a client of theirs wants that they cannot do internally, they know people that can. 

“We have a network of people that we can bring in,” Lisa Shorr said. “We have a good referral base.”

Secure Future Tech Solutions has about 100 steady clients and they have hundreds of others in their database. They court corporate accounts but still keep busy with individual customers, too. A good majority of their team are field engineers.

Another area they have been making more of an emphasis on is remote support. David Salera is one of the remote administrators and a senior network engineer. He works with the company’s clients using advanced remote access tools.

Before they had all this new technology, it could take hours, sometimes days for a technician to get there. Now it could take just minutes. Remote administrators can access your computer from a remote location and fix it rather quickly.

Ty Holden, a Warwick resident, is the leading remote technician. Their team of employees checks on all kinds of things, from making sure the virus signatures are updated and that there’s enough hard disk space, to making sure that the server is available and that the backups are running.

“It’s not the backup that’s important, its being able to get the data back when we need it, so if the backup stops working and then you don’t find out about it until you need the data, you have a problem,” Eric Shorr said.

They have all systems in place to alert them when the backup doesn’t go through, and when it happens; Holden is usually able to fix it.

“Just a few minutes ago I had an alert that came in,” Holden said. “It let us know that one of our clients was no longer accessible to the world, so something came in letting us know that their server was down. So we called them to let them know that we found that out and it came about that they just shut their server down and they were very thankful that we were on top of everything.”

Eric said that their goal is to be “proactive” as opposed to “reactive.”

From the conference room, Secure Future Tech Solutions employees can watch cameras that are not only on their property, but also anywhere they install them.

“So for our property management companies, they have multiple locations but what we can do is, at one of the locations we can set up at the guard station cameras where they can watch multiple sites, “Eric said. “So it saves them time and money because they don’t have to have two guards.”

A Swedish company called Access Communications makes the cameras that they deploy.

Lisa said the company has incorporated the “Fish! Philosophy” into the work environment. It is about the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, Wash. They are a company that is known for its incredible energy and commitment to service. There are four main premises they abide by: choose your attitude, make someone’s day, play at work, and be present.

“We take pride in who we are, we evolved with our name to really better suit who we are, and to reflect who we are and to really honor and really be fish friendly to our clients and to those around us,” Lisa said. “It’s really an important aspect of who we are as a small business. We really have a great understanding of Rhode Island needs.”

For several years now, Mayor Avedisian has made visits on a periodic basis to local businesses to learn what they are doing and how the city might assist them.

“This business has grown dramatically and we are thrilled to have them in the city,” Mayor Avedisian said. “They have added employees, increased business, and a model for high tech business development.”

Secure Future Tech Solutions is located at 110 Jefferson Blvd. Suite C, Warwick.

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