A Single Point of Accountability: OneNeck IT Solutions Spurs Digital Transformation Through a Diverse Infrastructure Portfolio

TL; DR: OneNeck IT Solutions is a purpose—and principles—driven organization that believes in the transformational power of the technology leader. Its portfolio of digital infrastructure, security, hybrid IT, application modernization, and multi-cloud services, backed by strategic relationships with industry-leading partners, is designed to support its customers at any stage of their IT evolution. OneNeck embraces its role as an extra set of skilled hands and invests in both strategic and technical talent to help its customers execute their traditional IT agenda by focusing on supporting and transforming internal operations as well as business-focused outcomes that can and should be tied to the IT agenda.

When the leadership team at Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. (TDS) set out in 2010 to build what is now OneNeck IT Solutions, it knew a potent combination of power players would make for a winning company. That’s why, through acquisitions, the company grew its squad strategically and purposefully — curating a tenacious IT force.

Their powers combined, the company emerged as OneNeck IT Solutions — a comprehensive provider of hybrid, multi-cloud enterprise-class IT solutions for midmarket and emerging enterprises. “Five different companies came together between March 2010 and September 2014, bringing unique capabilities to the table, and creating a successful digital infrastructure play,” said Terry Swanson, President and CEO of OneNeck IT Solutions.

Today, OneNeck continues to leverage its diverse perspectives and strengths to deliver on its expansive portfolio. This allows the company to tailor its services to the distinct and complex needs of clients, wherever they are on their IT transformation journey. With a pipeline of new products and services ready for release, OneNeck is finding even more ways to provide value as an extension of IT teams worldwide.

The company’s distinctive name, OneNeck IT Solutions, delivers a powerful message to customers. “OneNeck represents a single point of accountability,” Terry said. “Customers can come to us for a broad array of technological solutions, and we function as one source — delivering what we promise in our relationships and service level agreements.”

Terry said businesses need a strong and secure IT foundation to support them in the midst of a rapidly evolving tech space. Today, there are more choices to make than ever before when it comes to platforms.

“There are traditional on-premises, cloud, and SaaS opportunities; this entire world of choice and complexity has accelerated in the last five-plus years or so,” Terry said. “To differentiate and succeed in this environment, customers need a foundation that can help them accelerate, adapt, and then drive the digital transformation they need to remain relevant and competitive.”

Over time, OneNeck has seen the burden of building, maintaining, and securing that foundation fall primarily on tech leaders, who struggle in some cases to balance innovative, big-picture ideas with the daily demands that keep the business up and running.

“We see it even more pervasively in the midmarket and emerging enterprise space, where customers demand many of the capabilities that large enterprise accounts have in terms of technology and high availability,” Terry said. “But they don’t necessarily have the breadth of skills, people, or budgets to pull it off. That’s where we come in.”

OneNeck works closely with businesses to bridge the gap between strategy and execution by gaining a thorough understanding of the client’s current IT environment, challenges, and goals. This approach to managed services allows the company to meet customers where they are in terms of their technological journey and help them optimize what they already have and add new services where needed most.

“We can help along the way as an extra set of skilled hands to assist them in going from A to B,” Terry said. “Typically, we’ll earn customers’ trust incrementally by assisting them with some portion of the design, deployment, or management of their tech services — and we’ll do it at their pace.”

From there, OneNeck is available to help businesses scale as needed. Terry said the company provides clients the opportunity to offload processes such as disaster recovery, database management, application management, security, and storage management, among a vast portfolio of additional initiatives. “We do it in an optimal way, ensuring the best level of service at the best possible price,” Terry said.

OneNeck approaches each customer from a neutral point of view in that, due to its incredibly diverse portfolio, the company can serve individual customers equally, no matter what type of infrastructure they have.

“If you’re using traditional capabilities, we can help with on-premises solutions,” Terry said. “Perhaps you would like to back up a workload in a secondary data center. Or you need us to take on some of your services via a hybrid solution. We can extend these capabilities and work down the food chain of services we can deliver.”

OneNeck also partners with companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, Dell EMC, HP, and VMware, plus a wide range of other solution providers, to supply the hardware and software often needed to build individualized solutions.

“We create a path to help businesses with managed services, whether their workloads are on any combination of hybrid, on-prem, or our IaaS platform, and Azure,” Terry said. “We span the spectrum of traditional, on-premises IT all the way through multiple types of cloud services and up through the application layer.”

OneNeck’s unique value proposition is a product of more than two decades of experience between the five companies that joined forces to become the company Terry knows today. “When you look at OneNeck IT Solutions alone, it seems like a younger company,” he said. “But the reality is, we have the technical resources, process capabilities, and managed service capabilities that have been developed over many years with a strong base of referenceable customers.”

That experience helps the company build trust with the businesses it serves by positioning itself as a highly qualified set of helping hands — one that will allow them to allocate their best human resources to more critical and strategic initiatives.

Ultimately, this translates to reduced stress. “We might start with a specific need or use case, but over time, as we start to remove the burden of day-to-day infrastructure and application management and build trust, customers routinely tell us ‘we don’t worry’” Terry said. “In other words, we give them peace of mind; they know their operation is in good hands, so they can focus on their strategic priorities. Together, the business will be in a better position.”

Terry recently led OneNeck through a strategic development initiative in which the company met with industry analysts, distributed and analyzed customer surveys, and conducted additional in-depth market research. Based on those findings, OneNeck narrowed down three areas of future focus: security, application modernization, and partnership opportunities.

The company recently launched Virtual CISO Services, which is intended to allow companies to bypass the process of hiring a chief information security officer. Terry said the service is a launching pad for broader security offerings in the coming year. “We analyze your current environment; expose gaps, make recommendations for improvement, either technically, architecturally, or policy-wise; and work with the customer on a path forward,” he said.

OneNeck also plans to expand into the application modernization space through consulting services. “We’ll perform an application inventory to help clients get a handle on what they currently have in terms of the breadth of their application portfolio,” Terry said. “Then, we’ll identify dependencies, impart wisdom, and work with them to determine, then architect a solution that best serves their needs.”

Finally, the company plans to broaden its involvement in the Microsoft space. OneNeck already helps clients manage complex Microsoft Dynamics AX environments and Office 365. “More than 70% of customers we surveyed said they are using Microsoft to a significant and considerable extent in their environment today,” he said. “We’d like to expand into other Microsoft Platform-as-a-Service solutions that they’re coming to market with, specifically those that are Azure-centric.”

This approach will help the already strong and diversified company provide even more value as an extension of IT teams worldwide.