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ConQuest protects customers’ infrastructures and virtual machines

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Evolving from deployment partner to trusted consultant

ConQuest Technology Services has gone through several transformations over the past 15 years to become a Microsoft top management and security partner. The key has been the company’s ability to evolve from a deployment partner to a trusted consultant.

ConQuest’s work with a major car dealership company shows its fantastic evolution, including its ability to provide advanced analytic solutions for clients. What started with a migration from Exchange to Office 365 blossomed into a long-term partnership in which ConQuest helped the company relocate a data center with 8,700 servers to Microsoft Azure in only 120 days. Simultaneously, ConQuest built the company a new disaster recovery facility inside Azure, saving the company millions of dollars. Not long after this success, leveraging Azure advanced analytics capabilities, ConQuest further enabled the company with a solution to analyze three decades worth of data and identify the right inventory makeup for each dealership.

Today, ConQuest serves as a trusted advisor for many clients with similar needs—including 15 of the 17 Fortune 500 businesses in Florida.

“The Azure Management and Security is an excellent example of what digital transformation means. It is a new product from Microsoft, and now we can develop this product into solutions for our clients.”

— Carlos Villuendas, Azure Solutions Architect, ConQuest

Management and security is a game changer

ConQuest is strengthening its management practice by protecting customers’ infrastructures and virtual machines with the Azure Management and Security portfolio and products such as Azure Security Center. Management and security are two of the biggest customer concerns when moving to the cloud, and ConQuest founder Ben Tosada says the Azure Management and Security portfolio provides insights, analytics, advanced security, and other benefits that allow ConQuest to “go in and tell a complete cloud story, and put customer concerns regarding Advanced Security to rest.”

ConQuest has developed innovative intellectual property tools and capabilities on top of the Azure Management and Security products. First, the company worked on a project where they replaced a variety of other tools with dashboards based on Microsoft Power Platform and Azure Management and Security. Then the company recognized an opportunity to sell those dashboards to other customers.

President Jon Sastre says that selling the dashboards “is allowing ConQuest to essentially scale into a whole new direction of business than it would have ever been able to before.” In addition, ConQuest is developing interfaces, new reports, and other unique intellectual property—all of which are helping customers improve their management and security, and helping ConQuest step up as true Solutions Partner for its clients.

Business grows with shift to server migration consulting

By using Azure Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), ConQuest has been able to reach more cloud customers and create new revenue opportunities. According to Tosado, “Our server migration practice has helped us broaden our customer conversations. It’s also helped us get into annuity revenue offerings that we didn’t have before, and it’s helped us get access to new customers that we weren’t working with before.”

When ConQuest served as a deployment partner, the company’s conversations were largely with technical decision-makers. Now, as trusted advisors in Azure, the company has broader conversations with a variety of business stakeholders, including those in the C-suite, around establishing a roadmap and exploring technologies such as Azure Machine Learning, Power Platform, or SharePoint.

In each engagement, ConQuest listens closely to customers’ needs, gaining an understanding of the line-of-business applications, revenue generators, and challenges the customer faces. ConQuest then helps them re-envision the entire suite of tools they use to equip them to compete in the years ahead. It’s a larger conversation that drives success for clients—and for ConQuest.

“The great thing about Azure is that the service opportunities for a partner like us are almost endless—so today, in addition to doing infrastructure, we're working in analytics and business intelligence.”

— Bejamin Tosado, Owner, ConQuest

Managed services help ConQuest expand customer relationships

Managed services have been another key to ConQuest’s continued growth and expansion. The services provide a steady, reliable source of cash flow, and they create opportunities to maintain and deepen relationships with customers. In other words, ConQuest uses managed services to become a long-term, strategically engaged, and sought-after partner.

Sastre says, “I think there are a number of things strategically, financially, and tactically that have made [managed services] a critical part of our business.” The company’s focus on managed services has paid off, with managed services revenue doubling year over year, and more growth expected in the future, especially around consumption and cloud management.

ConQuest uses Azure Management and Security solutions as part of its managed services offering. Tosado says the company is “helping customers move their infrastructure to the cloud and at the same time we’re helping them manage their security while they move to the cloud.”

ConQuest’s business model is clearly paying off. In the past year, the company achieved 50 percent revenue growth, and 25 percent net income growth. In fact, the past five months have been the best that the company has experienced in the past 14 years.

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