Quartet Corporate Overview
IT Infrastructure Specialists
Quartet Service Inc. is a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto. Quartet was founded in 1998 to provide IT services to tenants in commercial office towers. The company was restructured in 2002 by an investor team led by Robert Bracey. With many of the original employees and a fresh balance sheet, the company was refocused on providing IT infrastructure services to mid-tier companies. The results have been very good and today Quartet is a mid-sized, growing and profitable company.
Our services will lower your IT costs, reduce your risks and add capabilities. We leverage economies of scale and economies of skill to do this. We focus on IT infrastructure, including telephony, networking and data services. This combined approach is particularly well suited to unified communications. We have successfully integrated the Cisco and Microsoft platforms into a unified voice/data platform in our own head office. We have a relatively large investment in IT infrastructure that our clients are able to use. This includes telephony (8 PBX’s), data (storage and virtualized servers) and networks (managed fibre rings and edge devices). We have been a CRTC certified Class B telecommunications provider for 8 years and we own our own block of IP addresses. We continuously look for areas where Quartet IT investments can be leveraged by our clients.
We vary our service levels and fees according to the business needs of our clients. If your business requires instantaneous response or next day service, we will develop a service package to suit. Our help desk standard service level agreement is 15 second live response and our median on-site response is less than 20 min. Quartet completed over 40,000 service tickets in the 12 months up to August 2008. Our clients are generally high performance mid-tiered firms that are close to one of our 8 offices in the GTA. We have a small number of large clients as well.
We have collaborative, open and frequent communication with our clients and a flexible business model. An example of client collaboration on IT development is our private WAN that connects over twenty office towers in the GTA. The inconsistent internet speed of the public internet was disrupting client-hosted applications and there was greater need for security and control. We designed a built a private network for our clients that overcame these problems. Various technical services are delivered over this network. Quartet also supplies IT infrastructure services to companies off its WAN.
We leverage geographic proximity and our centralized infrastructure to ensure service consistency and minimize travel expenses. Support staff in the Quartet office closest to you will become your regular on-site contacts. You will have one "Quarteter" who specializes on you and that person will have local backup to ensure continuity through holidays, staff turnover and emergencies. Local Quartet staff is supported by our help desk, server and network monitoring, after hours emergency response and other features. They are also supported by our network, telephony, server and project specialists who provide technical backup and are available for special projects as required. We call it "polarized service" (strong local/strong central) and it reduces your IT costs and risks.
Quartet has had a small number of large clients where we have designed specialized support programs to augment their IT capabilities. We have worked closely with the Greater Toronto Airports Authority since 2002. Quartet provides telephony support services for both the PBX and Voip systems. This includes help desk, monitoring and on-site MAC services. We also provide project management services, work on the CCTV systems and provide equipment "racking and stacking" services as required. We were instrumental in establishing the common use technical infrastructure system, where GTAA technology is made available to tenants of the airport on a managed service basis.
We have many clients in the financial services, health care and resource industries and have developed expertise in these sectors. In addition, our "not for profit" client group is growing.
Quartet’s culture reflects the values of the senior management team and is an important part of what the company is. Teamwork, Candour, Fun and Pride are the key elements. Profit sharing, continuous education, flex time, social events and full benefits are all part of supporting our culture. By design, over 75% of our revenues come from support retainers. This stability helps retain good staff over a long period. Our web site has a video on our corporate culture.
Quartet’s ability to work well with external organizations is one of its strengths. Through these relationships, we leverage additional financial and technical capabilities. Quartet has formalized partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, HP and Research In Motion. Robert Bracey is on the North American Cisco Channel Advisory Board and on the North American Executive Council for Venture Tech, Ingram Micro’s premier partners association.
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