Why Sphero Chose Electric to Power Their IT

Sphero relies on Electric for everything from day-to-day IT needs to special projects

Case StudiesITSecurityOnboarding & Offboarding

Why Sphero Chose Electric to Power Their IT

Sphero relies on Electric for everything from day-to-day IT needs to special projects

Client Overview

Client Since: 2020
Industry: Education
Offices Supported: CO
IT Situation Prior to Electric: In-house IT team
Employees Supported: 73
Devices Supported: 73

Over the past ten years, Sphero, an EdTech company that produces robotics & STEAM-based learning tools, has undergone several changes in their internal structure. These changes ultimately led to them shifting from a full-scale IT team to one junior IT employee for their 70-person company. While it seemed they were “getting by” with this 1:70 ratio and lack of internal expertise, this system would often break as support request volume increased. With requests falling through the cracks, unhappy stakeholders, and strategic projects being put on hold, it became clear that their approach to IT was not only unsustainable, but negatively impacting their business.

When that junior IT employee eventually left the company, the VP of Engineering, Brian Kellner, had to make a choice: rebuild an IT team or outsource IT elsewhere. After consulting his network, he decided to go with Electric. “It was clear from the beginning that Electric was a much more scalable and flexible approach to manage our IT needs rather than spending time and money hiring and training a new team.”

After signing with Sphero, Electric worked with Brian and their HR team to cover all their day-to-day IT needs. For new employees, this involved creating standard processes for on/offboarding and provisioning new devices and licenses for SaaS apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Excel. Electric also gave all Sphero employees access to real-time support, powered by 100+ IT technicians, right in Slack. These processes gave Brian his time back and created an improved employee experience tech wise, especially for new hires. “Before, I was essentially buying computers for new employees on Amazon and then filing expense reports. Then our new hires had to set everything up on their own. If they needed support? They slacked me. But now, I’m rarely involved.”

In addition to taking care of their everyday needs, Electric also helped Sphero with a variety of strategic IT projects that they hadn’t had time to tackle before. These included reinforcing their IT security by setting up disk encryption and transitioning away from Sphero’s poorly monitored Endpoint Detection and Response tool Sophos, to ThreatDown, implemented and managed by Electric. Additionally, Electric took on cleaning up unused licenses for their Google accounts, an inefficiency that had been costing them upwards of $2000 a month in unnecessary spend. In Brian’s words, “Without Electric, we never would have had time to get to these critical projects, which was ultimately costing us thousands of dollars a month.”

Nowadays, not only is Brian less involved with IT issues, he knows he can get the benefits of a strong IT organization, without worrying about the challenges or uncertainties of a fluctuating IT team. “Keeping people motivated in IT is tough, unless someone deeply loves the world of IT, because a lot of it is dealing with things breaking. Electric absorbs all that for me, and can scale with me without the challenges that come with building a team in-house.”

Technology Supported

Electric supports Sphero’s tech stack and devices.

Sphero
CLIENT

Brian Kellner

Chief Operating Officer

Sphero

Hiring, training and motivating an internal IT team requires thousands of dollars and years to establish. Instead I turned to Electric who will easily scale with my business, is significantly more cost effective, and meets our organization's IT support needs.

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