It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around it. The guy that had been our go-to IT support person for the past five years suddenly quit.
It was a Friday when I got the call, and I was tired. It had been a long day, and this news certainly didn’t make the day any better.
“What happened?” I asked.
His business partner explained that it had been a sudden frustration with technology and that because of this they were notifying their clients and closing the business.
I have to admit; I was torn. Part of me felt for him, another part of me – the business side – was spinning trying to figure out my next move.
With a gracious, “Let me know if we can do anything to help you.” I finished up the conversation and hung up the phone.
“Okay, you got this,” I said to myself.
“Surely there is another company that provides Oracle consulting in San Jose.”
The one thing that my tech support guy had taught me was that Oracle was invaluable to my San Jose tech startup. In fact, he had told me that any business that relied heavily on databases and leveraging analytics for business intelligence likely used Oracle.
Why?
Oracle is the leading database company in the world.
So, it shouldn’t be a hard thing to find a company in San Jose that provides Oracle consulting, should it?
The weekend was a flurry of activity at home – a long list of home maintenance chores I had been putting off for months – and Monday morning I attended the funeral.
So, it was Monday afternoon before my mind – and necessity – brought me back around to my need for an IT consultant that understood how to use the business intelligence capabilities of Oracle for my company.
I knew I had to fill that role quickly, but I wanted to make sure I got it right.
So I walked down the hall and sat down in the office of our CFO, Fred Trunkett.
What I wanted to know from Fred was the answer to the question, “In-house employee or outsourced IT support?”
We tossed it around for a while, but in the end, economics and common sense won out, and we opted to begin looking for a San Jose based IT company that specializes in supporting Oracle.
It took some searching – looking at website after website and making phone call after phone call.
Sure, a lot of San Jose IT companies had “Oracle Specialist” on their websites, but when I started talking to them about big data, artificial intelligence, and business intelligence, they started to stammer and make up nonsense – trying to get an in-person meeting.
“Why does this have to be so hard.” I thought.
“If you can’t help a two-hundred-employee tech startup to use an Oracle database to become more efficient and leverage analytics to make better decisions, don’t call yourself an ‘Oracle Specialist.’”
At this point, I’d had enough of IT support salesmen for the day and handed the project off to my Administrative Assistant, Joey. I told him to keep calling and let me know if he found anyone who spoke as articulately about the benefits of Oracle as our former – now deceased – IT guy had.
Poor Joey.
It took him four days of calls, messages, returned calls, and email chains to finally find someone he thought that I wouldn’t throw out the door in the first five minutes of an intro meeting.
The company he settled on bringing in to meet with me was Veltec Networks.
“Are you sure?” I said to Joey. “Don’t waste my time with another dud.”
Joey assured me that these guys talked the same as our former IT guy had and seemed to understand how tech companies used Oracle.
“Okay,” I said. “Set up the meeting.”
So that brought us to the Monday after the funeral for the meeting with the Veltec Networks people. I didn’t know what to expect, and in truth, after my fruitless search for a competent Oracle consultant in San Jose, I wasn’t expecting much.
But I’d told Joey that I would take the meeting, so I did.
Pleasantly enough, two guys from Veltec showed up ten minutes early for the meeting. They looked sharp, and from first impressions, conducted themselves like professionals.
After introductions were made and pleasantries were exchanged between the Veltec representatives and Fred, Joey, and I, it was down to business.
“Here’s the deal guys,” I said. “I can get just about any IT support company in San Jose to take care of our front office and production technology. What I haven’t been able to find is an IT services partner that can convince me that he or she knows how to use Oracle and our data to make our internal processes run more efficiently and give me real-time information to make decisions. You see, I don’t need just another business technology support company. I need someone that can leverage the point at which big data, business intelligence, and executive decision making collide. I need a team that will go further than technology and deliver IT consulting in conjunction with business savvy. If that’s you, great. If not, we can keep looking.”
I knew I was being blunt, but I just didn’t have time to waste that day.
What I expected was a few flimsy excuses and a hasty retreat by the Veltec team.
I didn’t get what I expected.
For the next hour, the Veltec reps took us into a deep dive on the capabilities of Oracle to make our operation more efficient and to give analytical insights into our executive planning processes.
It took me about the first thirty seconds of that hour to recognize that these guys knew what they were talking about. They weren’t reading off a memorized script, it wasn’t a sales pitch, and it wasn’t regurgitated language from the Oracle homepage. It was obvious, they had the skills and experience we needed.
Two days later, I signed the proposal they had submitted and by the end of the week, their techs were onsite familiarizing themselves with our setup and unique tech support requirements.
It’s now been about six months since we lost our tech guy and the day that I asked myself the question, “Who provides Oracle consulting in San Jose?”
Veltec hasn’t disappointed.
They have our instance of Oracle running well and have even found a point or two to improve on what our former tech had done.
All in all, we are very pleased and impressed with the Veltec team and look forward to a continuing win-win relationship with them.
Want to learn more about Veltec Networks? We have more outstanding articles for you HERE.
