Client needs drive development priorities

From the development side of the business, getting feedback from clients is immensely helpful. Our approach with OpCon has always been about making it as simple and easy to use as possible. How does this directly translate to our clients? The Director of Information Systems for one of our clients, Frandsen Bank & Trust, said it well for us, “It became apparent very quickly that the SMA Technologies product, through a single pane, if you will, could explain everything it’s doing across multiple operating systems, different programming languages and different departments.”

OpCon can use almost any scripting language to create automation workflows, from Python to PowerShell to Perl, which gives operators an immense amount of flexibility. This is what our clients want, because it makes it much easier to handle staffing needs when you don’t have to invest heavily into one person learning a new programming language. When your business grows and you want to expand your automation team, the potential talent pool is much deeper due to the large number of programming languages that OpCon can facilitate. Many of our clients are based far from traditional tech hubs, and this flexibility positively impacts their ability to meet their technical staffing needs.

It is important for our development team to know that our product is providing a big business impact for our users. At Frandsen Bank & Trust, we deployed OpCon Microsoft SQL integration with the calculation that it would reduce their managed services expenses by 75 percent. One of their largest expenses in the SQL environment was backup and maintenance plan verification. These are routine processes that were being done manually, and we were able to automate them and set up alerts to only notify the operators when it found exceptions or errors, greatly reducing their need for managed services. Frandsen’s Director of Information Systems, said “We really felt that OpCon was going to that deeper layer to automate the things that are truly a concern to us.”

I love these examples because they validate what we’re doing as a development team, and we know that our goals of making a customer-centric product are being achieved. We focus our efforts on creating the automation product that the clients need, and our internal processes here all reinforce that.

As Senior Director of Development here at SMA, I always get to hear directly from clients and it’s very encouraging to hear that clients are happy with what we’re doing and eager to give feedback that we can translate into new features and service offerings to meet their evolving needs. But one of the highest forms of praise a client can give you is when they tell their peers about the solution you’ve provided for them. We’ve operated for 39 years now and for about 37 of them we relied almost exclusively on word of mouth and direct referrals from clients.

Frandsen Bank & Trust based their decision in part on what they had heard from colleagues in their industry, “You need to take a close look at what vendor can deliver the total package and verify that the vendor has a track record with like-minded peers.” It’s statements like these that drive me and my team every day. We come into work because we want to be the total package for our clients, and we want OpCon to make a dynamic impact on their ability to achieve their business goals.

Want to find out how OpCon can be the client-driven solution you’ve been looking for?