I’ve had the pleasure of working with Impact Networking twice before, both times on articles with company President Dan Meyer. For this third adventure, I wanted to move beyond typical dealer profile material and hardware talk—enter Patrick Layton, Vice President of Managed IT Services at Impact Networking.
With over 20 years of IT experience, Layton has seen it all. He started with Novell to Windows NT upgrades and segued into the dot-com bubble, after which he entered the consulting space. His path then led him to Impact Networking, where for the past five years he’s spearheaded the mega dealer’s transformation from a reactive break/fix model to a true, proactive managed services program that’s growing at a fast rate.
| Patrick Layton, Impact Networking’s Vice President of Managed IT Services |
Layton touched on topics such as the mega dealer’s security-first approach, the cloud and Microsoft Azure, and one intriguing partnership that Impact Networking has with another Windy City-based company. Here’s just one of his many gold nuggets…
“We still do full management for the smaller clients, but in the mid-market space, we found that most of them do have at least one or two IT people. They’re core to the business because they understand the actual business they’re in, but one of the things they get bogged down in is that whack a mole, chasing fires and they never really get to the level of operating at the business level. Helping bring or merge the gap between technology and business and bringing solution, because they’re just chasing. So one of the things that we’ve been really successful with is a hybrid approach, where maybe we come in, we take over the workstation and server and network maintenance, we take over the Level 1 and Level 2 helpdesk, escalate back into that internal team. Those guys then can now go affect change in the business.”
You just need to hear the passion in Layton’s voice. Go for it!