Roto-Rooter, CIO: Reinvest in Your People and Business by Leveraging Cloud Technology

Paul Naglich, CIO, Roto-Rooter, talks to Dave Hammond, Senior Account Executive, Parallel Tech, about the importance of leveraging cloud technology as a way of investing back in your people and your business.

Naglich shares that they have embraced some of the newer technologies, whether at the data center or hosting services outside the four walls. They have leveraged that to some outside services, especially with cloud computing, Azure, and others.So they are starting to put more emphasis on the OPEX model and investing in the technology as a service, not just bringing it into IT and absorbing it.

He notes that he started this eight and a half years ago, and it was an 80-20 split, heavy on the CapEx side. It's now more of a 50-50 split. He shares that they will strike that balance as opportunities appear.

Naglich notes that mergers and acquisitions aren’t as common in the plumbing industry as they are in others. Instead, they have local brands that are well entrenched within communities. Roto-Rooter started 80 years ago as a nationwide, franchise-based model. Over the last 30 years, however, things have changed because franchises were ready to more-or-less exit the plumbing stage. So, for Roto-Rooter, it's a bit of a different model. “We have the same brand, we're just consuming the franchises and taking them into our corporate landscape,” he says.

Naglich thinks most CIOs and technology officers face the same COVID-impact questions, and they can't emphasize enough: Invest back in your business. He was extremely fortunate to build infrastructure and services that translated into being flexible anywhere, anytime. So, Roto-Rooter — with its virtual servers, virtual telephony, and CRM platform as a service — was able to take its business anywhere, at any time, not only regarding call centers, but also branch locations and, later, with field technicians in vans. Ensuring your company is able to work remotely is critical, he notes, and he believes COVID is what opened a lot of eyes to that.

“So many CEOs like me have been saying that we need to go to VMware, vSphere, and we need to do these things to be flexible, but it is an investment. And I can only encourage people to take those next steps into cloud technology — whether you want that to be a public cloud or a private hybrid —and leverage that technology, invest back in your people and business, so that they can be flexible and nimble at any time,” Naglich says. “That's what we've learned.”