We've been going 30 Years Strong

May 2023 marks 30 years of business for Strident. From our inception, we have sought to go beyond simply providing technical knowledge to being a business partner for our customers, advising on, and delivering, relevant technology that will help our customers grow. This focus on customer service has seen our business go from strength to strength over 30 years.

This professional approach has resulted in long-lasting relationships with customers and colleagues. Some of our engineers have been with us for more than 20 years, plenty of our customers have been with us just as long.

Technology has clearly seen the most dramatic changes of any industry over the past 30 years. What seemed amazing 10 years ago is now routine. Take a hi-res video, edit it, post it to the world from the middle of nowhere? Of course, this isn't the dark ages!

Three decades of progress

Keeping up to date with the latest technology is our profession. Senior Engineer, Wayne Lanchester, has worked with Strident since its start and reflects on some the changes in the past three decades.

"When I started, the use of IT was very limited with businesses having very few PCs. Smaller businesses often only had one machine which belonged to the finance department, with accounting being one of the earliest roles to adopt PCs," Wayne explains. As well as building PCs and servers, support for Sage accounting software was a key service for Strident at that time.

"Support was provided over the phone by attempting to mirror the actions of the client or visit the customer if necessary. Businesses were less reliant on computers at that stage, so response times were also less critical."

By 1996, networked PCs with a file server were making their way into more businesses. "Remote support was via a modem to the server. However, with four engineers and one phone line, we would have to take it in turns to dial into a client and data transfer was painfully slow by today's standards," adds Wayne.

Unsurprisingly, connectivity speed has been the primary barrier ever since, with ever-increasing speeds enabling more sophisticated remote support. By 2005, laptops had dropped in price, increased in performance and with Wi-Fi becoming more prevalent, more and more of these were giving business users mobility and flexibility to work from home.

By 2007, BlackBerry had become a popular business messaging platform and, in this year, it was joined by the newly launched Apple iPhone. "Sending and receiving messages and email while out of the office had become an important business requirement. The rapid adoption of smartphones saw these services and others now becoming an essential part of the business IT environment."

Head in the Clouds

Today, working from anywhere on virtually any device is seen as standard business practice. Cloud-based services from data and applications to telephony and video conferencing continue to get more sophisticated to the point where data security and secure internet access are now priorities for any business.

One thing will not change at Strident, however. We will always offer the highest level of professional IT support to our customers. We'd like to thank all our customers for their business over the past 30 years and look forward to going from strength to strength.

To find out more about our professional business IT support, please get in touch.