Eager to focus on 250 staff and more than 20,000 clients – a number burgeoning by 10,000 yearly – Hegedus welcomed the very down-to-earth “cloud” solution provided by i-worx (i-worx.ca). A 40-Under-40 winner, Allison, 37, first met with Andre Coetzee and Jose Gavina of i-worx in 2004 to talk about outsourcing Vida’s IT maintenance. At the time, neither Hegedus nor many others had heard of “cloud computing” – because it didn’t really exist. But even then, Coetzee and Gavina were envisaging an outsourced, centralized IT model they were sure would change the way businesses use computers.

Taking the IT needs of small and medium businesses into the “cloud” is a fundamental change to your workspace, Gavina says. “Your workstation is not in front of you. It’s in a secure data centre. It’s up in the cloud – and the cloud is locked up and secure.”

By 2009, the clouds rolled in: OfficeOneLive came into being. After five years using an earlier i-worx solution, Vida transitioned to cloud computing. For the entire Vida operation, this saves 23 percent over a typical information-technology service agreement. With the latter, a business buys its own software, systems, and servers, and outsources maintenance. By contrast, the i-worx plan saves about Vida about $16,000 a year. (According to Coetzee, for a typical business with 10 workstations, it saves about $5,000 per year.)

When she first signed on with i-worx, Hegedus might not have known exactly what she needed in an IT system, but she did know that the solution she chose had to be seamless. With five locations from Whistler to Seattle, Hegedus wanted something that worked, period. For that reason, even more significant than the cost saving is cloud computing’s perfect fit with Vida’s core values of balance, harmony, and calm. Spa staff don’t have to worry about computer issues they don’t understand; there’s never a panic because the systems are down; client information is safe and secure. In other words, Vida’s focus on wellness, including a 5,000-year-old Ayurvedic approach based on Indian techniques, pervades not just client service, but the company’s operations. That, in turn, fits with Hegedus’s goal of turning Vida into a brand recognized around the world.

A spa’s wellness values may not at first blush be concepts that most people associate with IT infrastructure. Yet they actually describe quite nicely the client experience i-worx seeks to deliver with its services. Coetzee and Gavina call their version of cloud computing “utility computing” – since it works just like the service you would get from a utility provider like the phone or electric company.

“You turn it on, it works, and you pay a monthly fee,” Gavina explains.

The concept has allowed Vida to outsource and centralize its IT needs and significantly improve the response time of its computers, reducing stress for staff. The concept also improves the experience of customers who phone in to book appointments: it reduces hang time as staff enter appointment-booking details.

“There are multiple steps in the booking process,” Hegedus says. “A two- to three-second delay at each step can be gruelling for the customer on the phone. i-worx understood our need for efficiency and made a difference in the quality of the performance of our team.”

For Hegedus, the availability of the hosted infrastructure has changed the way she approaches her business day. She regularly travels between the locations – between some of them, on foot – and needs to be in close contact with her core group of team managers, who, she says, “keep me sane.” Access to her corporate data means no more lugging her laptop from location to location – she simply logs on at any one of her locations (or at a hotel, or even her in-laws’) and the experience is the same as if she were sitting in front of her laptop – minus the backache and the worries about loss, theft, damage, and data corruption.

The centralized, cloud-computing elements of OfficeOneLive also meant that when Hegedus was working night and day getting her fifth location, at the Westin Bayshore, ready to open in time for the 2010 Olympics, she didn’t have to worry about IT infrastructure. She simply put her operations director in touch with i-worx, and they talked about how many new users the company would need. With the users set up on the hosted infrastructure in the i-worx data centre, Vida staff were able to access the corporate network, files, and spa booking system immediately – no growing pains required.

Part of the reason it’s so important for i-worx to offer this to clients is that they’ve dealt with growing pains themselves. When Coetzee and Gavina started their company back in 2003, they named it ROWe Business Solutions. The acronym stood for Rulers Of the World in Efficiency, and it embodied their desire to provide a unique customer experience within the IT industry – including creating new solutions that would change the way small and medium businesses thought about their IT needs. In the beginning, ROWe did just about anything their customers asked for, including servicing companies’ servers and computers, web design, software development, and so on.

“We’d have mopped your floor if you paid us,” Coetzee says.

That first year in business was a tough one – they brought in only $13,000 in revenue – but by year two they were earning $200,000. In 2005, with cash flow still a challenge but revenues steady, Coetzee and Gavina realized that limiting their business to focus on their core skills would allow them to provide a superior customer service experience and differentiate themselves within the IT space.

“We weren’t experts at software development or web design,” Coetzee says. “We decided to only focus on IT infrastructure. It was hard, because we still needed the money, but it was a pivotal decision. Saying no to work when we needed it most forced us to focus and become more effective.”

With this change came the focus on utility computing, and the name change to i-worx, which symbolized the new technology-driven focus of the company. It also marked the launch of Office in a Box, an early embodiment of i-worx’s utility computing vision that centralized servers and software licensing. Making the change was scary, but it proved successful. Revenues virtually doubled for the next two years, and in 2009 the company brought in $1.3 million in sales.

At the time of its release, Office in a Box was revolutionary, made possible by changes to Microsoft licensing. But even then, i-worx was thinking bigger, looking forward to the day when they would be able to set clients like Vida up on a fully centralized system that takes the responsibility for IT support, maintenance, and even upgrades, into the cloud. They knew business leaders would be able focus on what they do best, rather than being bogged down by IT issues.

Since all server and software upgrades happen on the i-worx side, Vida’s computer infrastructure will continue to function exactly as it does today – or better – even as they age. Any computer that’s capable of accessing the Internet can have the most modern software and functionality – even if its own processor would not be capable of handling it.

Users may feel like they are working directly on the computers in front of them, but really everything they do, create, view, or save, lives in the cloud. The computer stations they use to access the hosted infrastructure don’t need any software, or even a hard drive. While most companies need to upgrade their systems and servers (never mind their software) every four years, a cloud-computing user never has to upgrade again – the upgrades happen in the cloud, too.

Before cloud computing, robust IT infrastructure was simply not available to small and medium businesses. Many companies’ initial IT investment is a single laptop for a single entrepreneur. Some small companies invest in computers, but not the infrastructure or the expertise to support them, leaving office or retail staff to figure out what’s wrong when the computers seize up or the system goes down.

With cloud computing, businesses of any size can outsource their IT infrastructure to experts, paying only for the terminals and server space they need. The hosted infrastructure eliminates a lot of the hazards that come with storing vital business systems and information on workplace computers. For example, OfficeOneLive automatically backs up each user’s files every four hours, and saves those backups for seven years. If a company computer is stolen, lost, or damaged, the user’s data reside safely on servers in the cloud with much higher safety standards than your typical office.

“If your office burns down, you could still go home, get on your computer there, and have access to all your files,” Coetzee says.

The cloud also changes the way IT technicians do their work. i-worx’s systems analysts use remote management tools to access their client’s systems if there’s ever a problem, or something the user doesn’t understand. That allows them to solve 80 percent of client support calls without ever leaving the office – and gets clients up and running in a fraction of the time it would have taken for a tech to even get to the office in the old days.

 As i-worx migrates the rest of their clients to OfficeOneLive, they are excited about the potential cloud computing has for the future.

 “The way we see computing will change,” Gavina says. “Now, people are still a bit nervous, because of all the hype – like they initially were with online banking. But in five years, everyone will be using cloud computing. If you wait five years, you’ll have lost five years of a great solution. Cloud computing is here to stay.”