The Power of a Trusted Partner

Mallory compares Aprio’s previous office space to the dreary, monotone cubicle farm that Neo escapes in the classic action film The Matrix. “We knew we needed to re-energize and revitalize the space,” he says. “We didn’t want to make it look like any old office. We wanted it to look like the offices of the innovative clients that we interact with, modeled after tech and startup companies.”

Aprio leaders wanted the new headquarters to feature a variety of spaces for employees to work and collaborate. The company moved to a “free address,” or hoteling, model for employee workstations. Aprio also incorporated meeting rooms of different sizes, treadmill desks and open collaboration spaces for impromptu meetings. Designers considered details down to the shape of conference tables, which were tapered toward the back of the room to allow everyone a good view of the video screen. 

At the heart of everything was the technology. To support its new free address model, Aprio needed to provide robust wireless networking, equip users with modern devices and outfit collaboration spaces with appropriate video collaboration gear. Mallory says Aprio leaned on CDW from the very beginning of its planning process.

“We used CDW for oversight and as another set of eyes when we were evaluating what vendors were providing,” Mallory says. “CDW actually came with us to one vendor’s client experience center. We were looking at some things that were fairly new to our team, and it was comforting to know that we had someone sitting sidecar who lives in this world.”

Aprio worked with CDW partner eBryIT — headquartered in Kennesaw, Ga., less than an hour from Aprio’s Atlanta offices — to configure devices at scale using Microsoft Intune. EBryIT also stored the devices until Aprio needed them and ultimately delivered them to users. “That really helped remove some painful manual processes on our side and scale something that had been a sore area for us,” Mallory says. “They offered a white-glove, no-touch deployment, which really modernized our ability to deliver laptops to a remote workforce.” 

Working with a configuration partner was especially helpful in preventing problems as Aprio added new employees through mergers and acquisitions. “Before we expanded, it didn’t bother us to kind of throw in random technology, because we only had one office,” Mallory says. “When you start supporting multiple offices, that consistent experience becomes more important. Every two weeks, we have a group of new users, and if anything goes wrong, we’re going to hear about it.” 

Jason Bay, a national deployment support manager for eBryIT who oversaw Aprio’s device rollout, says partners are especially important during large IT deployments, office moves or other events that would normally burden an organization’s internal IT staffers. “We don’t do things customers can’t do on their own, but we do things at a scale and at a volume that they typically can’t handle,” Bay says. “Companies aren’t staffed to cope with the extreme demands of large refresh projects.” 

“When you’re moving offices, you can’t really have devices delivered to you, because the facility doesn’t exist yet,” Bay adds. “At the same time, you can’t wait until the office exists to place your order. You may not even know who your users are going to be, but as you hire those employees, you can submit those requests to us, and we can release that hardware.”

EBryIT handled configuration and deployment, but when it came to tracking down hard-to-find tech resources, CDW saved the day, Mallory says. “I’ve personally been shocked at how fast CDW has been able to find machines and deploy them in the middle of a pretty hectic pandemic and supply chain crisis,” he says. 

Mallory says Aprio officials adopted a “minimum viable” mindset to make the move a success, getting technology deployed that would at least meet users’ needs in the moment, then filling in gaps later on. For instance, the company moved its old Cisco Meraki networking gear to its new headquarters until newer equipment became available from the vendor. 

Chase Ierna, who was Aprio’s CDW account manager at the time of the move, says it’s important for business and IT leaders to ask their technology partners for help solving problems during complex deployments. “Internal IT professionals can’t know everything, but we have people who are subject matter experts in every specific silo,” he says.  

Laura Sikora, an advanced technology account executive with CDW, notes that partners can help increase the size of an organization’s IT staff during flurries of increased IT activity. “No one in IT has enough internal staff resources to get these sorts of deployments done,” she says. “Partners provide additional resources without adding headcount to the organization.” 

Mallory says Aprio simply wouldn’t have been able to track down and deploy the technology employees needed without help from CDW and eBryIT. “We probably could have scratched and clawed and found something to check a box, but there’s no way we could have maintained that consistent user experience,” he says. “There have been a handful of times where I was ready to hit the panic button, and CDW has been able to track down the resources we needed in the time frame we needed them.”

Story by Calvin Henick

Photography by Gregory Miller