Why IT Glue

Behind the curtain

My name is Chris Day and I’m the Founder and CEO of IT Glue™. I’ve been at this a while, about 16 (!) years to be precise, 12 of which I have been focused one leading of  Western Canada’s top IT providers for small- and medium-sized companies. Fully Managed™ employs about 40 staff across two cities with about 110 fully managed partners, and supports over 5,000 users and 10,000 devices.

The company has been so successful, and with such a great leadership team, that it was recently awarded prestigious awards for corporate culture, including Alberta’s Best Workplace and BC’s Best Employer for companies under 100 employees. I was also honored to receive the “Top forty under 40″ award earlier this year in Vancouver, something which came unexpectedly but for which I am very grateful.

I am incredibly thankful to be in a position where I can now focus my time and energy on IT Glue, still providing high level vision & strategy to Fully Managed, but leaving my incredibly capable executive and management team to run the day-to-day operations. I give you this background only so you have some context in understanding my motivations for this next venture, IT Glue. I am here to build something special, which people love. I am here to create another brand which makes a difference in peoples’ lives.

The problems we solve

There is a lot of complexity involved in managing a large number of unique IT environments across unique business and geographical boundaries. That said, an IT person with the right skills & experience along with good documentation can jump in and effectively support any network environment with minimal learning time required. This becomes exponentially more important as the size of the team and number/complexity of supported environments grow.  Even with a highly standardized, distributed IT infrastructure, it is still a significant challenge to on-board new staff and environments to be effectively supported.

The history

So, in 2004, I set out to address this challenge by working with a developer to launch an internal web-based platform called “Enterprise Resource Manager” or ERM. This founding developer, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a ninja-like resource who advises IT Glue to this day. In 2006, as the features matured, the platform was renamed to “Folio” in 2006, which remains in production as a test bed for new IT Glue features. What started out as a simple device/IP/password tool evolved over time into a rich collaboration platform which our IT group depended on.

In 2009, as I started becoming more involved in the MSP community across North America, I started getting pressure from peers, mentors and industry folks to turn this platform we had been using for over 5 years into something they could buy. The seed for IT Glue was planted, and the re-development of Folio as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for began in early 2013. Ten years later, with the help of some great people, IT Glue has arrived and we are ready to solve many of the key challenges you face in running an IT group (see features).

Contact us for a demo if any of the following resonate for you:

1. Documenting technology is seen as the root of all evil – maybe 1 in 20 IT people have this knack inherently
2. Documentation is largely static, and almost immediately (and frequently) out-of-date
3. Most people document things in notepad, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, password apps, wikis – zero consistency, and information sprawl
4. It is almost impossible to create meaningful relationships between documentation types – for example, passwords, devices, applications and licensing
5. Documentation can be as sensitive as financial data, but is often handled like hamburger wrappers
6. Sharing network documentation with a consultant or external party is virtually impossible or incredibly painful
7. IT staff are wasting an inordinate amount of time looking for documentation, or re-learning/re-documented what should already be there and easy to find
8. IT leaders and business owners are losing sleep over the lack of confidence in the documentation that often does, quite literally, keep the lights on

I will leave you with this thought: if you’re part of an IT company or IT department, you probably have one or more of these problems. You most likely have no real solution to these challenges. We solve them, securely, and for a very reasonable monthly fee. Give IT Glue a try and see why we are Galvanizing Trust™ worldwide. Like a delicate Star Wars model, we stick all of your IT information together just perfectly so that you can focus your time and effort on delivering great technology outcomes.