MASS Communications is highlighting its successes in its multi-year relationship with ICR, and its efforts to upgrade the firm’s bandwidth and to support ICR’s voice, interoffice connectivity and Internet bandwidth across five U.S. locations.
Based in New York City, ICR partners with companies to develop and execute strategic communications programs that achieve business goals, build credibility, and enhance the long-term value of the enterprise. The firm has grown rapidly in the last three years, from 100 staff to 160, and has expanded its New York City presence with a new office.
“Mobility is important given that our client managers are often on the road meeting with clients – maintaining an e-mail environment that is dependably on for people inside or outside the office is a top priority for us,” said AJ Fitzgerald, director of IT at ICR.
“The goal of our solution was to provide ICR with a more robust, resilient IT environment that is cost-effective,” added David Schwed, general counsel and CIO at MASS Communications. “Our multi-carrier solution enables ICR’s IT team to focus on other projects since we provide one invoice and one point-of-contact for all the elements of the solution.”
Fitzgerald oversees a four-person IT department that has revamped ICR’s IT infrastructure from top to bottom in three years.
“Not only was MASS able to consolidate our services under one roof, but they also significantly reduced our IT expenditures which was huge,” he said.
Previously, ICR had to manage and process invoices from three different carriers at each of the firm’s five U.S. locations. Now MASS handles all those carrier relationships, providing one bill and one point-of-contact if there is a network issue.
Now, “if there is an outage of one of our circuits, they are contacting us before we have to contact them,” Fitzgerald said. They are truly an extension of my department. In my 20 years in IT dealing with carriers, MASS Comm is by far the best network operation center (NOC) I’ve ever dealt with. They keep the lines of communication going so I don’t have to worry about whether the network is running smoothly.”
