Laredo Paint is a successful and expanding firm based in Texas, USA. They serve the needs of both home improvement professionals and consumers. Like all retailers Laredo Paint depends heavily upon computers, applications, and networks to run their business.

Laredo Paint’s owner Tom Addison had made a substantial investment in technology infrastructure by the time he was introduced to Small Office Networks (S.O.N.). Tom’s four stores relied heavily upon multiple POS systems (and their associated applications) networked together (WAN) to do transactions, inventory, and accounting.

While attending a trade show on the West Coast Tom saw a presentation by S.O.N.’s President Leon Gulchin. Afterwards Tom approached Leon to discuss some technical issues that were negatively impacting his operations.

The key issues were:

• Significant downtime due to leased line outages
• Cost of leased lines
• Cost of long-distance telephone service
• Difficulty resolving issues involving multiple IT vendors
• Lack of secure remote system access
• High I.T. support cost delivered on an hourly basis

After much discussion Tom decided to let S.O.N. take over management of his network. S.O.N. ordered all the necessary networks and components to re-vamp Laredo’s infrastructure. After an onsite installation of a “Hydrogen” server S.O.N. began the task of remotely managing network capacity and availability. An auto-failover safety net was also configured to assure that if availability ever reached zero dial-backup immediately began routing traffic.

	BEFORE	AFTER
COST	Leased-lines $1300/month $500/month long-distance bill High IT support cost on hourly basis	Leased-lines $0 $0/month long-distance bill Flat-rate monthly fee
REMOTE ACCESS	No access to the system from outside of the store No ability to employ other then local people. Significant down-time (days at a time) due to leased lines outages Inability to resolve issues with multiple IT vendors	Secure remote access to full functionality of the system Ability to employee a virtual workforce. 99.9% uptime for all stores Single point of contact for all IT related issues
BOTTOM LINE	Partnering together, Laredo Paint and S.O.N. were able to: Cut costs Reduce frustration Improve efficiency Enable new stores to rapid come online