On December 17th 2008, I sent this message to all of Steinhoff Consulting’s (DedicatedIT’s parent company) contacts:

Steinhoff Consulting is moving
Please update all addresses in your system(s) to:
Steinhoff Consulting, Inc.
620 Wilmot St.
West Palm Beach, FL 33405

Why are you moving?
Steinhoff Consulting has always believed in providing excellent services to you with as little impact to our Earth as possible – even before being green was cool.

Besides recycling and running nearly a paperless office, Steinhoff Consulting was one of the first IT consulting companies to begin supporting our clients via remote access. Not only did this directly benefit you by not having to wait for a tech to arrive on site to have your issue tended to, it indirectly helped you by reducing carbon emissions and conserving gas.

Our lease was up and that prompted us to sit down and calculate the amount of miles our employees drive to work each day, and it was mind-numbing: 94,738 miles each year to be exact. While some of us have more efficient cars than others, this amounted to nearly 4,712 gallons of gas each year.

As a company we decided to take another bold step in our efforts to be as green as we can be: stop commuting to work. We will be in a trial phase for 90 days while we test our customer service levels and the ability for our team to continually advance their technical expertise. Likely, this will not directly affect you in any way. Indirectly, however, we’ll be reducing carbon emissions, conserving fuel and pushing remote group collaboration technology to its limits with the hope of helping your company communicate better as a result.

What makes your move so easy?
We use the technology that we offer to you:
• Datacenter – Our equipment is in a datacenter on the Internet backbone – not in our office.
• Centralized storage from NetApp – it’s so fast, reliable and feature-packed, it’s scary.
• HP servers virtualized by Citrix XenServer – what used to take eight physical servers, takes three; and they are more reliable
• Applications delivered by Citrix XenApp – Our applications come from our datacenter and are delivered anywhere in the world over the Internet
• Voice over IP (VoIP) – Our dial tone comes from our datacenter and is delivered anywhere in the world over the Internet. I can take my phone with me anywhere.
• MS Exchange and Office Communication Server – Our team can communicate (in pairs or in groups) instantly and easily.

Moving soon? We can help! Give us a call.

I had a pretty good idea of what we were in for technology-wise, because we have been using much of the technology listed in that email since our company’s inception in 2002. What I was not sure of was how customer service was going to be impacted, what our clients and prospects would think about a company being run completely remotely and if our employees would still put in a hard-day’s work.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Over the next few months, I’ll be writing about these “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” and how our business has changed because of them.

Have you been considering a remote office? Are you in a remote office already? Are you in a remote office and considering a “real” office?

I’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences.