Your Business Resource for Columbia and The Midlands

Jeff Brewer is a name many entrepreneurs in the Midlands may recognize.

He is a technology entrepreneur himself, so far creating and selling three companies in the last 18 years in Columbia. He sold the first – The Database Group – after only three years in business, already boasting large corporations such as SCANA and Waste Management as clients. Two years later, he helped launch Agilera, where he served as chief information officer and vice president of operations. After a few years of constant travel, he left the company to start Business Vitals. And there his story really gets interesting.

After wearing the CEO hat at Business Vitals for 10 years and growing the company’s client base to corporations in 35 states and 10 countries, an executive from publicly traded EarthLink, Inc., called Brewer in the spring of 2011. By last summer, EarthLink owned Business Vitals, and Brewer stepped into the role of vice president of IT solutions and security at EarthLink.

“The acquisition process was extremely fluid and easy. I have been on both sides before, and the transition was easier than anticipated,” Brewer says. “Business Vitals’ record-keeping and financials were in order. The purchase was more successful than I could imagine; there was a partial alignment of the planets,” he jokes.

EarthLink, whose revenue for the last 12-month period is reported at more than $1 billion, is well known for providing internet services to residential consumers, but the 3,000-employee company has transformed itself in the last year to focus on business customers and their higher-end internet, voice, data and information security needs, according to EarthLink’s Vice President of Communications, Michele Sadwick. Business Vitals happened to focus on the same kind of business services for which EarthLink was searching. “It’s not rocket science. We are providing the IT services commonly required by most businesses, including network security and management, firewall management, and email services,” Brewer says.

“With the acquisition of Business Vitals, EarthLink is able to offer a complete solution to our 150,000 business customers,” Sadwick adds.

Business Vitals’ primary services focus – outsourced IT, professional security assessments, and disaster recovery services – enables EarthLink to more quickly address customer needs and increase capacity than by ground floor building. “This unique acquisition meant more jobs for Columbia, not hiring cuts or relocations,” Brewer says. “Everyone at Business Vitals was retained, and in fact, we have hired some new employees and are looking for more systems engineers, security consultants, project managers, and support engineers.”

The employees work in a 15,000-square-foot space at 1401 Main Street in downtown Columbia, which includes a 5,000-square-foot Tier IV data center implemented by Brewer pre-EarthLink. An additional 1,000 square feet serves as a Secure Operations Center (SOC), where EarthLink customers call or email for technical support, and which contains redundant network, power, security and environmental systems to ensure their technology systems never go down. Local customers, such as Long’s Drugs, Wilbur Smith Associates, Palmetto Propane and Blanchard Machinery, count on the center to deliver reliable performance, business continuity, and security for their proprietary data.

The data center was one of the reasons EarthLink was interested in Business Vitals, wishing to add it to the three data centers it already operated in other parts of the country. EarthLink has been purchasing other regional companies, such as ITC Deltacom, across the nation. In the last year, it has purchased in the range of six to eight companies, according to Sadwick.

“EarthLink recognized where the market was headed in IT services and the commoditization of voice and data, plus there was a desire to leverage existing fiber infrastructure for higher end services,” Brewer says of the acquisition.

The new title and change in responsibilities are somewhat of a relief for Brewer. “I don’t worry about financial reporting and analysis anymore,” he says. “The legal and CFO issues are off my brain, and now I can evangelize the importance of managed IT services and security solutions to current and potential clients.

“I don’t miss the administrative details, although my detail-oriented nature makes me good at it. Now I’m focusing on educating customers and potential customers on how they can take advantage of EarthLink IT Managed Services and Cloud Computing, having services delivered from the ‘cloud’ or to the customers’ facilities versus running systems themselves.” Brewer says his job leaves him time to explain to companies how they can outsource the parts of technology they don’t want to do (for example, cleaning up and preventing spam in their email inboxes).

The hardest part of the whole process for Brewer was letting go of Business Vitals and what he had built as his “baby.” “I became symbiotic with the business, riding the waves up and down. Letting go was difficult. When you’re an entrepreneur, you live it, breathe it, eat it and sleep it. I never took a vacation day when I was not connected to my company. I was acutely aware of what was going on. It was a hard adjustment to contemplate,” he says.

“I originally had a different plan in mind, a plan to organically grow Business Vitals to a $100 million IT services provider with an operations center in each U.S time zone,” he continues. “But this [new position] with EarthLink is a great situation for me because I know what it takes to deliver secure, reliable IT solutions for companies. And now we have the EarthLink brand and resources to grow it way beyond what would have been possible.”