News Detail

2018-10-30

By QuickTec IT Support and Services

"Never stop building meaningful relationships with customers and other people in your industry." Read about what else our General Manager Hanora Gilligan shared in this week's Galway Chamber Business of the Week series.

Welcome to the Galway Chamber’s Business of the Week series. This week, we spoke to Hanora Gilligan, General Manager, QuickTec I.T. Support and Services.

Introduce yourself.

My name is Hanora Gilligan, and I am the General Manager here at QuickTec I.T. Support and Services.

Tell us about QuickTec I.T. Support and Services?

QuickTec is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary as one of the leading IT Solutions Providers in Galway. We have a team of 15 people working in our operations centre in Ballybrit Business Park where our experienced IT Engineers provide Managed Services to our customers who want to focus on their core business and leave the management of their IT to experts.

We help solve business issues through IT Agility, IT Solutions and IT Support and we are about maximising service efficiency, resolving problems before they become an issue and driving continuous service improvement.

How did the idea for QuickTec I.T. Support and Services come about? How did it get started?

Quicktec Computers (it’s original name) was started by Joe Hurley and Kieran Flannery in 1993, at the beginning of the reinvention of Galway as one of Europe’s leading ICT and Med Tech clusters after the closing of DEC – Digital Equipment Corporation’s hardware manufacturing in Ballybrit.

In the early years, Joe and Kieran focused on providing custom designed Servers and Workstations and installing networking solutions for small and medium sized enterprises. Around this time, schools had begun to buy in computer equipment and needed external resources to maintain their hardware. Joe and Kieran saw the requirement for this service which moved the focus of QuickTec from building to supporting.

As a result, companies who didn’t have their own internal IT departments began calling QuickTec for IT Support and IT Solutions and the company grew to meet the ever increasing demand.

Today our services include Managed Services, Cloud Solutions, Microsoft Office 365, WiFi Solutions, Networking, Hardware Sales and Remote and Onsite IT Support.

How has being a member of Galway Chamber helped you?

It’s helped us grow our business in the last 5 years after coming out of a bleak recession. Thanks to the networking opportunities it’s provided, we have gotten out there to meet with new potential clients and brought on board new customers from different industries we hadn’t engaged with before.

We’ve also promoted QuickTec through the ezine and hosted our own Business After Hours events which allowed people who might not have been familiar with us before, to come in and see our business and meet our team!

What is the biggest challenge, in your opinion, facing businesses in 2018?

The National Broadband Plan. Traffic in the city and rising rents are causing businesses to look at relocating outside of the city but then they’re prevented from making that move because of rural broadband. In 2018, businesses rely on high speed broadband and that’s a compromise most businesses can’t make.

What changes have you seen in Galway over the last 5 years, with regard to doing business?

Clients have a lot more information now than ever before, they’ve already googled their symptoms before going to the doctor, looked up legal advice online before visiting their solicitor and searched “why is my PC slow?” or looked up PC and Laptop prices online before they ring an IT Support provider. In response to that, the businesses are who succeeding in this Information Age are those who hold integrity as one of their core values and who are proving every time to their customers that they are the experts in their field, they are listening to their customers and they are coming up with solutions to meet their requirements. That’s why our customers stay with us. Otherwise it’s very easy for a client to switch providers.

What one thing do you do every day that makes your business a success?

Listen and talk to our customers AND our team.

What is the best piece of advice you have been given?

Never stop building meaningful relationships with customers and other people in your industry. Choosing to instead view competitors as potential partners and collaborators can positively impact your business in a big way.

If you could give one piece of advice to someone just getting started in business, what would it be?

Have a plan, but to thrive be prepared to learn, adapt, innovate and repeat. We wouldn’t be here 25 years later if we were still doing what we started out doing!

QuickTec I.T Support and Services 
Ballybrit Business Park
Galway 

T:  (091) 756070
W: www.quicktec.ie