In April, I wrote about the importance of working with a local IT company. But there’s another side to working with local companies – IT subcontractors.
Living in a global community means that we are often working with people from all over the world. Whether that means getting a product imported, having coworkers in a different time zone or getting a company in California, NY or Japan to take care of your IT needs. For the last, you can bet they’re not very well going to fly out themselves to do an install.
So how do multinational companies with headquarters in another state or country install telephone systems, cables or other IT equipment? By hiring an IT or structured cabling subcontractor like RCI.
While RCI has a few thousand clients for telephone or other IT support within 200 miles of Roanoke, VA, we also do a substantial amount of business with other IT contractors.
Aren’t they our competitors? Technically, since they do the same work, they are; but in most situations, they have secured a National Account with a large corporation to service all of their sites. Because there is no way for RCI to work with a client with that sort of existing contract, there’s no reason we can’t work with large national IT companies and IT or structured cabling subcontractors in Southwest Virginia.
Who Needs IT Subcontractors?
Companies that need IT subcontractors come in different shapes and sizes. You’ll find RCI working with all 3.
Corporations That Need IT Support
There are many multi-million dollar companies with multiple locations across the country or world. Most of these companies have their own IT department but many of those IT departments don’t have boots on the ground in every location where they have a branch.
For corporations like that, their IT department frequently call local IT experts and contract them out as IT subcontractors to complete all of the in person tasks that the internal remote IT departments can’t complete from their remote locations.
Multinational IT Companies
On the other hand, there are many multinational corporations that are IT companies. Basically, every telephone company is like that. Most of them go with the dealer model similar to a car dealership but that is changing.
Today there are a lot of phones that are available to the consumer directly, so the dealer model is evolving a bit. In addition, with the prevalence of the cloud, there is a lot more that telephone manufacturers and dealers can do directly for their customers.
But they all still need local IT subcontractors.
Whether it’s a cloud dealer or manufacturer, they can’t do it all remotely either. And so they call people like RCI. So we are often IT subcontractors for larger IT corporations.
Small IT Companies (Like Us)
Finally, the third type of company that we do IT subcontracting for is companies just like us.
RCI has on several occasions picked up customers with multiple locations. Usually, they’re all in within 200 miles and in that case we will take care of all locations ourselves. But sometimes we pick up customers who have locations further away.
In those cases, RCI will often make an agreement with an IT subcontractor in another state where the other locations are located. Sometimes we make a deal with a manufacturer when they have a dealer network. Other times the subcontracting is more direct.
Similarly, other IT companies who work with customers with multiple locations will subcontract RCI when we are much closer to a customer branch that they can’t reach.
It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
In summary, though I always encourage you to shop local and hire local service providers, sometimes, even when you don’t, you will still end up working with one.
