“Transforming Enterprises Beyond Imagination ”

Robert Hessel, CEO & Chairman of Source 1 Solutions, is very clear in his strategy. He hires the best people available and empowers them to make decisions and enact upon that strategy. He has a strong emphasis on organizational fit as the culture of the organization is a key asset. Like Steve Jobs, Robert believes, “we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

From his time as an athlete and as a member of the US Military, Hessel learned the most valuable lessons of life, which he would incorporate in his entrepreneurial journey. Robert went on to build Source 1 Solutions, an industry-leading global IT service provider and has been hailed as a guardian-angel for companies worldwide.“Athletics taught me about the values of sacrifice, drive, and competitive spirit which are needed in business. Whereas, the US Military is arguably one of the most well oiled machines on the planet,” says the steadfast leader. “The code of conduct, chain of command, and teamwork that is dedicated in relentless pursuit of the team mission are the same values and beliefs that need to be implemented to grow and lead a successful organization.”

Today, as the Chairman & CEO of Source 1 Solutions, he has implemented these principles and taken the organization to new success levels in both profitability and job creation. “Source 1 Solutions began the same way most startups do, we had an idea and took it to market to test—what we found was gap in the marketplace,” he explains. “Source 1 really gained clarity in who we were going to be when we identified the big opportunity our business solved well: augmenting a company’s technological capablities with our own people and extending their geographic reach.”

“Source 1 really gained clarity in who we were going to be when we identified the big opportunity our business solved well: augmenting a company’s technological capablities with our own people and extending their geographic reach”

For example, one of their North American customers had a deal spread across 17 different countries. While they had plenty of resources here in North America, they did not have the resources or the experience to service the other 16 countries. “That instance was where our whole inception on being a services only channel-based provider came to light and expanded,” he adds. “This idea, which started out by getting just a few small projects in Latin America, has expanded now to servicing SLA driven contracts in 118 countries.”

Assisting Clients Seamlessly

The company’s experts work with clients helping with data center related issues like management, strategy and planning, and security implementation. “There could be many methods involved in providing this service, from architecture planning to remote hands for implementation needs,” says Hessel. “But it all relies upon the needs and issues assessment, which we do at the very beginning of an engagement.”

Their typical process includes:

Security and Safety Assessment: During this exercise, every possible technology area will be examined by Source 1 Sr. Engineers and the client’s designated team. The Source 1 team will document and assess all infrastructure areas, search configurations for vulnerabilities, and best practices.

Data Evaluation: In conjunction with their overall assessment, Source 1 will determine the client’s technology health through their scorecards. The client’s scorecard ratings will identify areas that are low, moderate, or high risk of being vulnerable or faulty.

Investment Recommendations: Once the assessment is complete, data evaluation will help Source 1 prioritize where to invest in improvements and how urgently those decisions may need to be addressed.

Once a strategic timeline of implementation is decided on with the customer's advisement, the Source 1 PMO team takes over for implementation, which takes 30-60 days, depending on the scope.

“They cover all aspects of your clients’ IT needs including lifecycle management, managed services, managed security, and business continuity. This encompasses the entire breadth and depth of our managed services offering,” says Hessel. “Our approach is to provide a thorough assessment of the current infrastructure, business needs and requirements, and future planning needs.” The Source 1 team then evaluates and makes a suggestion – they only provide better and best suggestions because good is not good enough in the current environment.

“We utilize industry best practices and proven technology leaders. By providing the customer with optimal opportunities for improvement we are setting them up for success as well as we can,” says the steadfast leader.

By partnering with truly great companies and taking the lead, Source 1 shows its customers the right solutions, even if it means having hard conversations. Source 1 specializes in supply chain management, unified communications, data networking, WiFi + data centers, electronic security, and network security solutions. Their skilled pool of field service engineers are from local regions, speak native languages, and truly understand their specific regions' cultural practices. While collaborating with their high-level, Tier 3 engineers in Source 1 Solutions’ 24/7/365 network operation center, their specialist providers deliver complex implementation solutions, third-party maintenance offerings, and a fully managed services offering with a focus on security.

Creating Technological Roadmap

The company concentrates on creating a solid technological blueprint and roadmap with their clients. With this in hand, Hessel and his team can then identify new technologies and trends that they can harness to accomplish those goals. These include:

Artificial Intelligence – not robots in that sense of the word – but technologies an applications that can make choices based upon a given set of rules, making it easier to adapt to what rules and implementation processes our partners may already have chosen with their customer.

Cloud Applications – Cloud-enabling applications is still on the rise – SAAS

Virtualization - Getting rid of hardware – optimizing power for a more efficient implementation process.

Analytics – Bringing all of the data into one platform so that comparisons, decisions, and forecasting can be fully analyzed

For instance, senior leaders in the financial sector wanted to upgrade their technology in 3000 locations in Eastern Europe. “The challenge was that our partner did not have in-country storage facilities to warehouse the new technology, nor did they have field engineer resources for implementation,” explains Hessel. “In addition, the end client financial institution did not have an internal IT department at these locations that could assist in the migration.” Source 1 used one of their in-country staging facilities to receive the equipment, manage the inventory, and deploy the inventory to the sites with their field engineers to complete the installation.

Sharing another instance, Hessel says they had a client in the retail sector that wanted to migrate and upgrade their wireless network. There were more locations in an accelerated timeline than they could handle with their internal team. “We worked with our partner to share the workload to perform the wireless assessments, and the post-assessment installations across 42 countries to meet the timeline of their customer,” says Hessel.

Hessel is particularly proud of his rapid reaction workforce. Although, as a managed services provider, they strive to be proactive in every aspect of technology that they manage, their staffing methodologies have proven that they can deploy hundreds of technicians at a moment’s notice all over the U.S and the World to tackle priority issues and needs. “This Rapid Reaction Workforce enables us to be the vendor of choice for disaster recovery planning for multiple large scale hospital infrastructures,” he adds.

Guiding the Future Leaders

As per Hessel it is incredibly important for the future leaders to know who they are as a business and who they are not. “You cannot get distracted by shiny objects. You must keep clarity on what your special sauce is that will make you achieve sustainable success in the marketplace,” he explains. “Secondly, one of our four core values, which has served us incredibly well in our ten-year journey, is prioritizing relationships over deals. It is okay to say “no” to something to preserve a relationship rather than to say “yes” knowing you cannot deliver. Good clients will come back to you and appreciate you telling them “no” and being honest, rather than taking a gamble at destroying a relationship for the short-term win of a deal.”

Though Hessel hinted about upcoming projects and plans for the days to come, he and his team practice a general rule to keep that information close to their vests. “Still, we have very serious intentions to open an additional office outside of the Americas and Europe to better service our global customer base. Those plans are still taking shape as we have several regions that we are strongly considering,” adds Hessel. “We will also be working towards enhancing our solutions and giving he best to our clients with each passing day.”IE