Ivy Networks – We Manage Your Technology So You Can Manage Your Business
Ivy Networks provides Proactive IT Management to Southern New Hampshire’s small businesses. We’ve been helping our clients succeed with the right technology for over 20 years. We specialize in serving small businesses with 5 to 50 computers and provide cost-effective IT management solutions that improve their efficiency, productivity, security, and competitiveness. We’re all about managing your IT so you can manage your business!
Hi, I’m Ken Tyrrell, the President, and Owner of Ivy Networks LLC. I’ve always been amazed at the power of the Personal Computer. In high school, I had access to my first PC, a TRS-80, and was one of the first students in my class to turn in reports that were produced on a computer, not typed on a typewriter. The discovery that I could just hit the backspace key to fix an error and reprint an entire report in a few minutes was miraculous. I was hooked on the power of what PCs could do and the efficiency they could provide. I knew I wanted to work with them and make a career out of this.
Thirty years later, as the President of Ivy Networks, I’m still passionate about helping others get the most out of their IT investments. And I still get a kick out of the wonderment others enjoy when I’ve just made their jobs easier by enabling the right technologies.
Ivy Networks has over 20 years’ experience providing our clients the proactive IT management services they need. We’ve worked with businesses in Manufacturing, Health Care, Legal Services, Retail, Engineering, and Public Libraries along with others.
All of our clients came to us by word-of-mouth referrals. We know this will continue, but we’re taking a leap forward and doing some marketing to grow our business. However, we want to remain small and provide the personal service that larger IT management companies can’t. This is what our clients like best. That they can always reach us and count on us to focus on their needs, not ours.
If you want to know the details about how I made it to where I am today, please keep reading.
While still in high school I began working part-time for a local company that manufactured electrical components used in power supplies. It was pretty neat to see the internal components.
Right after high school, I started coursework at the Vocational Technical College, (now NHIT) on a degree in Industrial Electronics, learning all about IC chips and the TTL logic used in making computers. I changed jobs, needing full-time work, and went on to a printer manufacturing company where I started doing assembly work, and eventually found my way to the circuit board repair department where I could start putting my new education to work.
I continued working on my Associate’s Degree at night, and when completed, I continued with night classes to work on a Bachelor’s Degree in Techni-Business, a program specifically designed for Vo-Tech graduates to round out their technical degree with business skills. When the printer manufacturer closed its doors, I had no trouble landing a job with a PC manufacturer. I was so excited to be getting hands-on experience building PCs. This job also introduced me to computer networking and servers, opening a whole new world of possibilities and excitement.
I continued to plug away at my Bachelor’s Degree at night and completed it just in time to see the manufacturing industry take a nose dive. Within a few months of earning my degree, the PC manufacturer gave the staff notice that they were sending their manufacturing jobs overseas.
My education and skills positioned me for my next big job, and I easily found work as a Computer Operations Specialist with a healthcare company. I was now deploying desktop computers in a business environment, configuring the networking, and connecting them to servers. This was the most awesome job ever. I learned about and earned certifications in Microsoft Desktop and Server Operating Systems. I learned about and deployed server-based applications such as MS SQL Server, MS Exchange Server, and Internet Information Server (IIS web server). And I also learned about TCP/IP networking, the core communications protocol used to make up the World Wide Web or what we now call the Internet.
While working here, a friend of mine asked if I would be interested in helping them set up a new business office. They needed two computers that could share data and have access to the Internet. And so, my first consulting job was launched, and with it an idea that someday I could be an Information Technology Consultant. I went back to night school and started taking MBA courses, and every course I could to learn about being an entrepreneur and running your own small business.
My next employment transition came about when health care in New Hampshire began a rapid consolidation. While the new company that bought out my employer wanted me to stay on, I chose not to as they didn’t use the new Microsoft technologies that I had so recently studied and became certified on. I took a municipal government IT job where they were eager to deploy the technologies that I knew were going to dominate the desktop and server market in the immediate future. Working for The City was now the best job ever!
I jumped right in and learned about Wide Area Networking (WAN) and connected over 40 municipal buildings to City Hall. I worked with the schools, Fire and Police Departments, the Department of Public Works, and the Public Library. Each department had their own specialized software to manage their business units. And I had the opportunity to work with all of it.
The next big thing that came along was server virtualization and storage virtualization. Using VMware to turn one physical server computer into many virtual computers allowed for major server consolidation and major savings for The City. I studied the new technology and was certified by VMware. I led a team that reduced over fifty physical servers to four. This technology also opened up new cost-effective methods of performing backups and disaster recovery. I also realized that this technology wasn’t just for big data centers. It had real benefits for the small businesses that I was serving part-time. Today, most of our clients use virtualization and benefit greatly from it.
I completed my MBA and now serve many small businesses in Southern New Hampshire. Today I am President of Ivy Networks, but we’re still a very small IT Management consulting business. I’ll be adding a few new employees over time. But we’ll always provide the same, personalized service that I always have!
Ken Tyrrell
President and Owner
