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Customer Story: C1

Remote Work Is the Future and C1 Embraces It

Headquartered in Minnesota, C1 works with more than 11,000 clients worldwide. Leveraging its decades of expertise, C1 provides its clients with a wide range of solutions, including collaboration, networking, infrastructure as-a-service, telephony, unified communication, and cybersecurity. C1 prides itself on being innovative and forward thinking but prized above all else is the connection it forges with its customers.

Helped C1 realize $4.5 million on cost avoidance and savings over three years.

Blocked more than 80,000 COVID-19 phishing emails in one week.

Ability to view and transfer all work documents in a single platform.

Digitization and Distributed Work

C1 is no stranger to remote work. Given the nature of its industry, the majority of its staff work outside the office – on the road, at client sites, or from home.

C1’s rapid expansion posed another challenge, as well. Most of its growth occurred via acquisitions, as the organization sought new solutions to better serve its clientele. Although these acquisitions greatly enhanced its capabilities, they brought with them something else: sprawl and IT complexity. “We needed to consolidate, but we also recognized that you can’t force people away from the tools and devices they’re used to – not without providing a better alternative. They wanted to keep doing things the way they did them before the acquisition” Buechler recalls. It was through BlackBerry that C1 found a solution.

We initially explored BlackBerry’s portfolio as a potential offering for our clients,” says Buechler. “After seeing what the company had to offer, I realized this was what we’d been looking for. It solved all our problems.” C1 adopted the full suite of BlackBerry® UEM tools, which enables remote workers no matter where they are. Built with next-generation networking and security technologies, BlackBerry UEM equips a distributed workforce with both online and offline access to all the apps, data, and tools they need without requiring active device management or complex VPNs.

It doesn’t matter what system you have on your device or what device you have. As long as you have BlackBerry, you have access to your work. That’s helped us realize about $4.5 million on cost avoidance and savings over three years.” — Collin Buechler, Information Security, Data Privacy & Compliance officer, C1

C1 Transforms M&A IT

BlackBerry UEM enabled secure, low-friction device integration, preserving user satisfaction and avoiding significant hardware costs.

Streamlined Acquisitions

In 2019, C1 acquired IT solutions provider Venture Technologies. Of the firm’s 500 employees, an estimated 90% relied on Mac® computers for their day-to-day work. With C1 operating under a traditional acquisition model, Buechler and his team would have taken those devices away and replaced them with Dell™ laptops. “We would have been looking at half a million dollars in hardware that people would use only grudgingly, if at all,” explains Buechler. “BlackBerry allowed us to avoid this pitfall entirely, saving us money and keeping morale high. We actually had very little turnover from that acquisition.”

Greater Satisfaction

Because users were able to remain on the devices they were familiar with, this also led to a significant reduction in IT integration help tickets – 80%, by Buechler’s estimates. “Our Director of IT infrastructure asked me if people were actually using BlackBerry solutions,” Buechler recalls. “In his experience, people complained when they had to use a new system. With BlackBerry, we gave people the solution, and it was business as usual for them – we don’t need to force people into a single solution.” BlackBerry UEM helps ensure that corporate data is kept safe. “For me, it’s about peace of mind,” says Buechler. “It can sometimes take days or weeks to come up with a virus definition, and we’re not in a climate where anyone has that sort of time.” “I’m not worried about users circumventing security because they’re at home or on public Wi-Fi,” he continues.

Cost Reduction Through Digitization

BlackBerry has allowed C1 to significantly reduce infrastructure costs, scaling back its IT environment and eliminating all of its workstations. It’s also reduced the cost associated with lost, stolen, and damaged devices. As long as an employee has been online within the past 24 hours, they have current copies of all their work – they simply need to install the necessary software on a new device. “We recently had an incident where an individual on her way to one of the most important sales calls of the year forgot her laptop at a security checkpoint,” Buechler recalls. “Because she was using BlackBerry Workspaces, she was able to purchase an iPad® and get all of her data back within fifteen minutes.” According to Buechler, BlackBerry’s software solutions are lightweight, low-friction, and incredibly easy to deploy. Yet for Buechler, C1’s relationship with BlackBerry is about more than cost-avoidance and distributed work. It’s about the lasting partnership forged between the two organizations.

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