The ‘Ridiculously Helpful’ IT Team

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SHI delivers tech support on demand, around the globe

In these days of constant change, selecting the right technology is a formidable challenge for any company. Luckily, there’s a global group well equipped to solve the toughest IT puzzles: the “ridiculously helpful” people of SHI International, a group of diverse teammates proving that a global solutions provider can give the focus, agility, scale, and expertise required to meet the unique business and IT needs of its customers as they move into the hybrid world.

More than 15,000 corporate enterprise, government, and academic organizations rely on SHI to support their transformation, collaboration, security, and optimization needs. Three decades of private ownership and consistent growth have allowed for consistent reinvestment into the business as SHI delivers custom IT solutions backed with world class customer support.

With over 500 technical architects and specialists, SHI has technical resources in every major customer geography across the country and expertise around data center, cloud, security, networking, collaboration, and end user computing.

Headquartered in Somerset, N.J., with major operations in Austin, Texas, the UK, and a growing local presence around the world, the company, which is the largest minority women owned business in the U.S., finished 2021 with more than $12 billion in annual revenue.

Mike Voss

Mike Voss, SHI’s Field Chief Technology Officer, has guided many corporations through their digital transformations. When we asked him the most common concern organizations have when considering such projects, he pointed to a recent study stating that 70% of these ambitious undertakings fail because of employee resistance.

Acquiring new technology is relatively easy, but changing the organizational structure and processes is a significant non-technical challenge.

“Often organizations have siloed strategy and decision-making and a risk averse culture and are dealing with a limited budget that may not be aligned with this digital transformation strategy,” he said, adding that to truly transform, both an organization’s technology and operating model need to be modernized.

“We help customers through the challenges with our expertise around cloud transformation and governance. Our people are our greatest asset, along with our vast capabilities to help our customers transform, modernize, and scale their businesses.”

With a 500-person strong technical engineering group, SHI consistently attains the highest levels of technical certifications and accreditations. Their Customer Innovation Center showcases cutting edge data center technology. SHI has warehousing and integration centers, as well as a lab where customers can test how various networking security and data center products integrate with each other, as well as managed services to help achieve each client’s desired business outcomes.

“Having all these resources at our disposal at scale, combined with the relentless approach to customer success is what sets SHI apart from the competition,” Voss declared, adding that SHI gives customers access to hundreds of thousands of industry leading technology products, each of them priced aggressively and paired with world class support.

Customers have come to expect their solution providers to be focused on business outcomes, providing thoughtful and nuanced guidance that considers people, process, and technology. “I look for partners who deliver best-of-breed solutions while aligning with our consulting methodology of focusing on customer outcomes,” he said. “We lead with the customer outcomes in mind and then create the solution using a multivendor approach.”

Security is one of SHI’s solution practices, and the firm collaborates with customers to find the right balance of risk and control they need. “We have folks that used to be information security officers that are now working in a solution architect capacity,” Voss pointed out. As they advise their clients on the ideal blend of products and services to meet their needs, they conduct security posture reviews to identify gaps and redundancies. “Security is an absolutely huge focus both for how we're interfacing with our customers as well as internally. It's the foundation for everything.”

The power of meaningful help

While virtual desktops are not new, the pandemic-spurred acceleration of remote work and the need for supporting technology has rapidly increased their popularity. Scalable cloud-based technology makes it easy to create an agile workforce on-demand and allows for greater control over where the data lives.

Additionally, SHI makes it possible to establish virtual desktops on demand only when needed; they are integrated with existing tools and automation workflows. The approach brings a new level of agility for growing global organizations that need to break down data silos, increase security, and mitigate supply chain issues. “It puts us at the forefront as a transformation and automation partner.”

Voss described a compelling use case from a customer leveraging offshore development resources. “Cloud virtual desktops allow them to provision resources on demand, only paying for consumption and ensuring that even if those users are in another country, the data that they're accessing never leaves the United States,” he said.

For one client, the company integrated Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop with their IT service management tools, creating a full automation workflow for new users. Voss posited that if a company needed to provide virtual desktops for hundreds of users at one of their offshore locations, the desktops for those users could be automatically deployed in just two hours.

“That's a vast improvement versus having to take weeks or even months to get laptops shipped out and configured to those users,” he said. “That agility is a competitive differentiator.”

Another point of difference is SHI’s intensely people-centric culture, as you might have guessed from their passionate declaration of radical support. It’s based on the belief that people thrive when they have a good coach-mentor relationship, have competitive compensation, and have a path toward growth. “Some of our core values are to be ridiculously helpful, choosing to win, taking ownership, and being authentically you,” Voss revealed. “When we make mistakes, we fail forward and we either win or we learn.”

Their focus also pinpoints employee development and enrichment. Providing paths for growth has significantly impacted retention while drawing the industry’s top minds to their impressive talent bench. They are happy to share their keys to workforce success with their customers, advising C-level execs struggling with finding and keeping great people.

“Often our approach with them is, ‘Let us show you what SHI is doing internally with our black belt program to develop our technical engineers and our upward path for advancement.’ Having those kinds of things in place and having a thriving fun culture is really what makes it a great place to work and ensures our success,” he stressed. “I see a lot of our engineers coming in, and I'm continually impressed with the diverse skill sets and backgrounds that we bring into the organization.”

Voss concluded with the words of Thai Lee, SHI's co-founder and CEO, who morphed from a $1 million reseller into a $13+ billion global powerhouse. “At SHI, we don't target customers. We talk to them, we understand where they are and where they need to go, then we help them select, deploy, and manage the technology that will help them get there.”