VHT Mastering Cloud Computing with FairlawnGig

With more than 25 years powering customer service for countless market leading brands, Fairlawn’s VHT and its Mindful platform helps companies meet customers where they are, move them seamlessly across channels, and improve experience metrics.

With lots of bandwidth and IT support needs, VHT relies on FairlawnGig to help them operate internally and to power its Mindful platform that utilizes both talk and text to ensure its customers offer the best customer support available to solidify customer loyalty. VHT has a growing office and headquarters in Fairlawn’s Embassy Parkway, home to approximately fifty employees while another hundred employees or so are located throughout the US.

As VHT’s primary service is to help ensure great customer support experiences, the recent pandemic came with a silver lining for VHT as communication needs skyrocketed and spun from in-person to an influx of remote methods including customer calls, emails, and texts.

Thankfully for VHT’s Sr. Manager IT Operations, Shawn Smetak, he had already made the decision to switch from incumbent ISPs to FairlawnGig early on in his leadership.

Prior to the switch in 2019, VHT’s IT infrastructure relied on two separate circuits, both with capacities a mere fraction of bandwidth of what FairlawnGig would deliver. The second circuit was to ensure redundancy should ISP/circuit one experience an outage. This is great, in concept, expect outages were frequent and the cutover took 20-30 minutes, which may not sound like a lot, but multiply it by 150 employees by a half hour and it would result in real inefficiencies and lost revenues.

“As soon as I was in charge of IT, the first thing I did was call FairlawnGig,” explains Smetak. “They’re local, they have a great reputation, and their service is impeccable. Every business in Embassy Parkway has and loves the service. FairlawnGig designed solutions to fill our needs and now provides two one gigabit circuits, entering the building in redundant, diverse paths, that never Intertwine and if one were to go down the cutover to the other would be instantaneous. The FairlawnGig team is one of the sharpest networking teams I’ve ever worked with, also, if you have to reach out to support, it is fanatical.”

FairlawnGig’s services and support of VHT don’t stop there as FairlawnGig designed and built a transient fiber gateway to Columbus for a direct connection to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As a cloud-based software company, VHT relies heavily on FairlawnGig’s assistance to liaison with AWS and ensure operations are running smoothly. Smetak explains that FairlawnGig helped set everything up with AWS and continues to follow-up to make sure everything is running smoothly.

FairlawnGig also helped VHT setup its enterprise routers to ensure optimum performance to support a massive amount of data for remote employees, customers, and customers’ customers. Gigabit FairlawnGig circuits also guarantee speed and performance, critical in the service industry. Smetak says this is the case even over VPNs, notoriously a bottleneck for lesser network connections.

“Since we’ve switched to FairlawnGig more than two years ago we’ve seen zero outages, all while saving between 50-60%,” says Smetak. “Maybe just as importantly, I haven’t heard one complaint about the internet since.”

“FairlawnGig is the best thing ever. No nonsense… their contract is one page, simple. I’ve been in IT for more than 25 years and by far, without question, FairlawnGig has been the best ISP that I have dealt with… and I even used to work at an ISP!”