A Conversation With ... Luke Simon

Alexander Open Systems is based in Overland Park, Kan., but has 20 other offices across the Midwest. Tell me more about the 500-employee company.
AOS is a family-owned business and was founded by Gary Alexander and his four sons – our domain name is AOS and the No. 5; that stands for Gary and his four sons. Initially, they were focused on government and education and built a model around expanding. Generally, we would be classified as IT consultants. Systems integration is really our core. We have four manufacturers we base most of our investments around – Cisco, EMC, VMware and Microsoft.

The Springfield office increased IT employees during the last year by 187 percent, going from eight to 23. Why the need?
Some of that is in the overall tracking of total employees versus billable engineers as tracked by Springfield Business Journal. The growth that we have, in respect to our region which expands outside the boundaries of southwest Missouri, has been large. [For] every other office up into Oklahoma and Arkansas, Springfield is the parent office. The growth from our office has been the stability that has allowed us to expand across those state borders and to be able to open an office in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Rogers and Little Rock.

Lately, we’ve added a lot of post-sales implementation folks, engineers. In 2009, when the economy was down, we consolidated some resources back into Kansas City and shared. We also invested in the market, opening a handful of offices.

What types of businesses do you work with?
The majority of our customers have their own IT staff. That’s kind of the role that we have served, supporting these developed teams or these mature teams. Some of the largest are health care, K-12 and higher ed. Our role would be to come in and get them from point A to point B faster than they can do it themselves.

We accelerate business objectives within a company. For example, if a health care client is evolving from one health information system to another, they need that infrastructure to support it. We could come in and evaluate the infrastructure needs that could help them migrate to the next version.

Most of our clients are really good at maintaining day to day operations whereas we specialize in consulting, design, implementing and support. I like to call our guys ninjas.

What’s the biggest issue facing the tech industry right now?
Staff or talent acquisition and retainment is quite possibly the No. 1 issue in most of my accounts. One of the biggest trends has been trying to support IT initiatives. The reliance upon IT today is higher than it has ever been. It’s all around the applications. To a business, you have an objective. Say it’s a bank and they are going to acquire another bank. How can the two operate as one, if their systems are not connected? That in itself is a huge barrier for the two to share resources across the entire system. We connect those types of things. It takes a lot of talent to be able to run these applications.

What’s the one thing businesses can do to increase productivity?
Standardization. Cheapest is not always better. It’s like the old adage, stepping over dollars to get to pennies. Standardization seems to be something a lot of folks have a hard time grasping because it may require them to spend more money on something. What they don’t see is the operational drain, or tax, on the organization that it requires to support that same number of investments. Standardization allows their people to be better, be more specialized, respond to issues quicker and in more of an efficient way.

What emerging technology are you seeing – what’s the next big thing?
What most people think of when they think of IT trends is it’s going to be a certain device that’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think the biggest advancements we are finding on devices are not the objects themselves, but the applications. It’s not the mechanics; it’s everything it can do. The application-centric infrastructure is going to drive companies to make big decisions and decide how much of their data they want to put with an outsourced cloud.