Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1269641
16.07.2020 2 NEWS SALES EXECUTIVES FULL-TIME / PART-TIME THE COVID19 pandemic exposed many Maltese com- panies, especially SME's, who still did not appreciate the extent to which IT and cloud computing can help them drive their business to success when applying automation. According to a Eurostat sur- vey published in 2018, 37% of Maltese companies were adopting cloud computing, placing Malta at the ninth place amongst all EU coun- tries. "When the pandemic broke, those who had invested in the right technology, espe- cially cloud technology, saw their productivity remain un- changed because they found themselves with a huge big competitive advantage be- cause they were in a position to adapt to the new situation much faster," Eyetech Ltd.'s Managing Director Patrick Cutajar said. IT services company Eye- tech Ltd spent the past four years pushing its customers to move to Microsoft's cloud solutions. "This experience taught us that although many compa- nies want to be ready for any eventuality, there were many others who suddenly found themselves struggling to adapt to the effects of the pan- demic," Cutajar said. "In fact, COVID also helped us decide that offering cloud solutions for SME's will be our compa- ny's strategic direction in the coming months." Eyetech Ltd was founded in 2002 to provide IT services to clients in different verti- cal markets from on-premise setup of infrastructure, net- works and hardware installa- tion, configurations and setup of servers and computers in- cluding operating systems. Other services include man- aged network routers and switches, backup and disas- ter recovery solutions, secu- rity, and monitoring services together with a vast range of services available on the cloud mostly provided by Microsoft like Microsoft 365 and Azure. In 2017, Eyetech Ltd won the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for Malta for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implemen- tation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technol- ogy. "With this achievement, Eyetech' s clients where fur- ther assured that they were being served by a compa- ny familiar with Microsoft's cutting edge technology and nowadays, when we are in- troduced to new clients, they come with a sense of trust in our work," Cutajar said. "In fact, I would say the big- gest achievement in the past 3 years was the move of most of our clients to the cloud, es- pecially Office 365, where we are one of the leaders in this sector." He explained how during the pandemic, online services saw a drastic increase in usage. "Since we had pushed the use of Cloud services with our customers, most of them were already prepared to work remotely through tele- working. Other non-prepared customers, like those who had to deliver products to their customers, had to adapt to the new change by starting to accept orders via limited technologies like WhatsApp or Messenger but their ad- ministration set-ups were overwhelmed by the amount of manual work they had to do to serve customers, and consequently, retain them." Remaining competitive in this sector is highly difficult but the positive outcomes for our customers during these past challenging months de- fined Eyetech's strength as a catalyst in pushing customers to incorporate digital tech- nology in their business pro- cesses. Eyetech is currently migrat- ing several of its clients to Microsoft Azure, a platform that hosts all sort of cloud services, from basic websites, virtual servers, and firewalls, to hosted databases, online apps, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence. "We are also helping them reduce costs especially those related to licenses and servic- es while providing them with training on products that will help them achieve more in a remote environment, like remote meeting solutions, solutions that were rejected in the past but which are now in very high demand," Cutajar said. "Our strategic direction will continue to be the original one, that of being the IT ad- ministrator for those compa- nies who want to deliver true digital transformation." Many Maltese SME's still need to embrace IT IT companies are pushing clinets towrds cloud computing Pandemic exposed dangers to companies who were not IT ready