When Daniel Charland and Donald Nokes founded NetCenergy in 2003, they planned to grow a successful business by offering highly skilled network technicians and engineers at a fraction the cost of internal staffing, with an unrivaled response time and success rate.
Three years later, Warwick-based NetCenergy has 14 employees and about 210 clients. And while the private company does not disclose its sales figures, Nokes, the president, said that by September of this year, sales had reached more than double the total for 2005.
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On Nov. 14, Citizens Bank honored NetCenergy as the first winner of its Peak Performance Award, given to a Citizens business customer in Rhode Island that exhibits unusual growth and demonstrates a strong commitment to customers, colleagues and community. Charland, the CEO, Nokes and Peter Nelson, NetCenergy’s director of technical services, first met and worked together at CORE Business Technologies, in East Providence, and another firm beginning in the late 1990s.
Charland was an IT salesman and consultant who began his career with EMC Corp. Nokes has a background in personnel and operations management and spent the 1980s supervising a team of more than 100 sales and technical representatives at 16 Radio Shack stores in New England.
Nelson is a Microsoft server engineer who studied at the Berklee College of Music and Rhode Island School of Design before becoming a corporate technician for CompUSA.
The three and a fourth employee who had also worked at CORE Business Technologies launched NetCenergy in August 2003, providing Microsoft network computer support for small to mid-size businesses.
Over time, NetCenergy has emphasized remote support of its clients’ computer networks, reducing its response time and enabling its own operation to be more efficient, Nokes said.
“We can literally control our clients’ networks from our office. For example, if your computer was being slowed down by viruses or spam, we could log into your network and reload a single computer from scratch to the way it was when purchased in 20 minutes,” he said.
Yet from the beginning, the firm aimed to dispel the aura of mystery that many IT firms shroud themselves in. Believing an educated customer is the best customer, NetCenergy gives its clients all the tools and information they need to understand and operate their networks.
NetCenergy is currently planning a seminar series for clients that adopt the software system Altiris. Every month, users are invited to visit the company’s Warwick facility to learn about a particular feature or configuration of the product from experts with both NetCenergy and Altiris.
“Not all of our clients … want to be IT experts,” Nokes said. “They want to run their business, and we enable them to do that. But there are others who want to have a day-to-day understanding of what’s going on with their IT, and for those people, we help develop their understanding of the technology they use.”
In three years, NetCenergy has expanded its range of practice areas beyond the server marketplace and developed new partnerships, with hardware manufacturers, telephone system support groups, staffing agencies, Internet service providers, security specialists – even office furniture vendors.
The backbone of NetCenergy’s operation is a service dispatch software system that integrates with its billing system, making the process of managing the business as efficient as possible, Nokes said.
NetCenergy offers an annual service contract under which the company continuously files and updates every detail of a client’s network, to shorten its response time when service calls come in.
“You call up and say ‘Oh, [my computer] is doing this, and we don’t have to ask ‘What network are you on? How much ram does it have?’ ” Nokes said. “We know your system, and we know the technical details of it.”
Perhaps above all, NetCenergy has built its business on a commitment to customer service and to being an exemplary partner for its vendors, Nokes said.
The firm’s commitment to building relationships sets it apart, according to one longtime client, the Pawtucket Red Sox.
“With Don and Dan and their crew it comes down to the attention, the detail, the service they provide,” said Matt White, chief financial officer for the PawSox. “We’ve had a lot of instances – especially during season, which is not a nine-to-five operation for us – when Don or Dan and their crew have come over at all hours of the night to make sure that we continue to operate.”
NetCenergy uses its IT expertise to assist local nonprofit organizations struggling with the financial and technical burdens of their network systems. The company has adopted Make A Wish Rhode Island and the San Miguel Middle School in Providence, and maintains the computer networks of both organizations as a community service.
“Our clients appreciate the fact that when they do business with us, they’re also helping these two very worthwhile agencies,” Nokes said.
