Last month marked the fifth anniversary of Greenmark IT, the Presque Isle-based technology company started by Eric Warren that is now the largest provider of managed IT services for businesses and organizations across the region — making sure everything from payroll to email runs securely on the Internet.
Warren was one of Aroostook County’s first modern technologists, surfing the early version of the Internet at the University of Maine Presque Isle back in the early 1990s when he was still in high school. He started working in business IT in 1996, at Netherland Office Products, but by 2010, as amid the changes of the the Internet and the economy, he felt he should go out and start his own business IT venture.
“I had ideas that were a lot more progressive,” Warren said. “I wanted to follow those ideas and implement technologies sooner. It was a frustrating thing. We were 10 years behind the curve.”
Warren has brought the modern IT of cloud computing, where businesses can use the Internet and Greenmark’s data storage, processing and management services rather than run their own servers and networks. Today, Greenmark has about 300 clients, including local school districts, law firms and others.
Greenmark offers businesses cloud-computing and hybrid IT services, by leasing space from Pioneer Broadband’s Data Center and taking on the data hosting and processing needs that traditionally would have required businesses to have their own servers, as well as running many of their software programs.
One client, the financial advisor Thompson Hamel, just signed up for Greenmark’s managed services plan, paying a set fee per month for all of their computer network needs — a model fast becoming the norm across the nation and one Warren believes can be successfully adopted by northern Maine businesses to stay competitive.
“We’re transitioning to this proactive type of service, using software to keep their network’s healthy, monitoring content, and encrypting emails with personal identity information,” Warren said. “This service is the standard elsewhere.”
