Over the last two months, I’m proud to share that we’ve accomplished a great deal and made significant progress on two very important Service Delivery objectives: ServiceNow Implementation and Hiring More Senior-Level Experts in Servers, Storage & Networking. The information shared below is designed to provide you helpful updates, but also encourage you to ask any follow-up questions which pique your interest.
ServiceNow Implementation
In 2020, XSi continued our commitment to total client satisfaction by embarking on a business transformation journey. This transformation enables XSi to deliver on our client’s ever-growing enterprise hardware service needs. In this journey, XSi took a hard look at our core business systems and determined that we were not positioned for the flexibility that our clients expect and deserve. Therefore, we launched an exhaustive process to find an industry-recognized and best-fit solution, which resulted in our decision to team up with ServiceNow, with a comprehensive implementation. This implementation is being executed, at a high level, in three phases. Phase 1: CSM Implementation, is currently in execution with a projected “Go Live” date of February 15, 2021. This means that our current and future clients will have a new and improved experience when opening/viewing cases via their Portal access, as well as additional visibility into their contract information including covered assets, SLAs, case history, and much more – all in one location!
Hiring More Senior-Level Experts in Servers, Storage & Networking
We’ve proactively added several senior-level L2/3) technical experts to our Service Delivery teams the last few months. Here are detailed bios for each of these impressive new-hires:
Jake Akers, Senior Support Engineer, Data Center Services
Jake Akers joined XSi having built a reputation as a technical leader for enterprise IT hardware, across a career spanning nearly 20 years. Although his expertise crosses multiple OEM servers and storage, his client-earned respect has centered on HP-UX, HP ProLiant and Dell X86. Additionally, he has unique expertise in HP and Dell tape back-up, as well as HP San Switches. Prior to joining XSi, Jake held senior technical support positions at Curvature, SMS Systems Maintenance Services (merged with Curvature) and Abacus Solutions. Jake resides in Denver, North Carolina, with his wife and three kids.
David Graves, Senior Support Engineer, Data Center Services
David Graves joined XSi to help further its reputation for expertise in hybrid hardware maintenance for enterprise data storage. David brings significant depth of experience in EMC Symmetrix, VNX and Isilon systems, but has cross-training in other storage platforms over an impressive 20+ year career. Prior to his technical career, David served our country in the US Army (31Lima COMMS). As a storage technical expert, he’s held various engineering and client service tech roles at EMC, Wells Fargo, Lowe’s Companies, McKesson (SAN Admin, Level 5), LPL Financial, as well as a Level 3 storage engineer at Ardent Support Technologies (a 3rd Party Maintenance provider, like XSi), up until Ardent’s acquisition by Park Place Technologies. Following Ardent, he provided storage hardware leadership at Blue Cross Blue Shield and London Stock Exchange Group. In addition to Level 2/3 technical expertise, David is skilled in storage administration on multiple OEM platforms (HDS, IBM, EMC and Infinidat). David, with his wife of 30 years, and their nine children reside in Waxhaw, North Carolina.
Jake Lawson, Service Delivery Manager, Data Center Services
Jake Lawson joined XSi following an impressive technical career at CSU Industries, and also at Curvature. Originally from Rochester, New York, Jake started his post-secondary education in mathematics, but quickly discovered a passion for the logic of computers, particularly computer hardware. He’s built Level 2/3 expertise across both servers and data storage, with greatest emphasis on HP ProLiant (mastery of any WinTel servers), Dell PowerEdge, Sun SPARC systems, Dell PowerVault, HP DSXXXX, Sun StorEdge and IBM xSeries, which he thoroughly enjoys. Jake, his wife and teenage daughter live near Dallas, Texas.
Richard Sims, Network Support Engineer, Network Services
As a Senior Network Engineer, Richard Sims joined XSi following a dynamic background at FIS (Fortune 500 company), NWN (Cisco VAR), SMS Systems Maintenance Services & Curvature (3rd Party Maintenance providers), Family Dollar (bought by Dollar Tree) and Retail Business Services. Throughout his networking support career, Richard has attained CCNP-level Cisco expertise, but also brings a remarkable depth of experience for F5 Networking hardware, Azure & O365 Administration, as well as intermediate-level Google Cloud experience. Richard, his wife and daughter, live in Concord, North Carolina, just north of Charlotte.
As you might imagine, we’re quite proud of the steps we’ve taken to impact client service, satisfaction and delivering remarkable Service Quality. If you should have any questions or comments, I welcome your inquiries by phone or by email.
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