This article is written in the first person by Scott Henderson, founder of Finite Technologies. It is his perspective on what kind of company FTI is, and why.
I am an engineer and a mathematician. I am not a salesperson, and I never set out to be one. That is not a boast, and it is not a complaint about people who sell for a living. It is simply the most useful thing I can tell you about how FTI works, because the background of the people running a company shapes almost every decision it makes.
When you choose a managed IT provider (often called an MSP, for managed service provider), you are not just buying a list of services. You are choosing whose judgment will shape your systems for years. So it is fair to ask: who is making those calls, and what are they trained to do?
Where I come from
My career started in engineering. Over the years I have worked on engineering projects across Alaska, the rest of the United States and Russia. I founded Finite Technologies in Alaska in 1990, with a grant from the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation, as an engineering software company.
Our first commercial product was FTIDOE, a commercial version of DOE-2, the building energy simulation program. Engineers used it to model how a building would use energy before it was built. We sold it worldwide and ran it on whatever computers our customers had: VMS, DOS, Windows, Unix, Ultrix and AIX. That kind of work teaches you to respect the numbers, to test your assumptions and to care whether the answer is right, not just whether it sounds right.
Later we built IBeX, our communications software, starting in 2002. I have also founded other companies, including SimuFlight in aviation. The thread through all of it is the same: design something carefully, build it, test it, and keep improving it.
Two ways to run an IT company
There are, broadly, two ways to run a company that looks after other people’s computers.
One is to lead with sales. You assemble a package of services and tools, often from a polished presentation someone else prepared, and you sell it well. The technical team’s job is to deliver what was sold. If the contract is a lump sum for “keeping things running,” the pressure on that team is to do the least that keeps the client from complaining. Nobody is being dishonest. It is just what that arrangement rewards.
The other is to lead with engineering. The core business is providing the service itself: designing networks, building systems, fixing what breaks and improving what is there. Sales still matters, because every business needs customers. But the decisions about your systems are made by people whose training is in how technology actually works.
There are good salespeople and well-run sales-led companies, and I would not pretend otherwise. My point is that you should know which kind of company you are hiring, because the incentives are different.
What changes when technical people are in charge
Systems are designed, not just assembled
A network that works well is designed for the way your business actually operates: how many people, where they work, what they depend on, what happens if one piece fails. A box chosen from a vendor quote is not a design.
Changes are tested before they reach you
Engineers are trained to distrust anything that has not been tested. At FTI that shows up in small, unglamorous ways. For example, we automate updates but hold new patches briefly, test them and then roll them out system by system. We explain why in Windows updates: timely, not rushed.
Problems are fixed at the cause
Restarting something until it works again keeps a ticket count low. Finding out why it failed, and fixing that, keeps the problem from coming back. An engineer is not satisfied until the second thing has happened.
Your systems move forward
Keeping things running is the minimum. A technical team should also be looking ahead: which equipment is aging, which software is approaching the end of its support, where a better design would save time or reduce risk. That is what I mean by moving a client forward, rather than just keeping them minimally served.
Tools serve the work, not the other way around
Our managed IT runs on Kaseya’s integrated platform, where tickets, billing, documentation, monitoring and backup are all connected, and it is secured with Sophos. We chose them because they fit how our engineers work. An AI layer now works alongside our engineers, watching across those systems, but people decide and act. When the right tool did not exist, we built it ourselves. That is why we have our own software.
What to ask any provider
- Who owns or runs the company, and what is their background?
- Who will actually design and change your network?
- When you call with a hard problem, how quickly does it reach a senior engineer?
- What did they improve for an existing client last year, not just maintain?
- Can they explain, in plain English, why each tool they propose is there?
Our guide on how to choose a managed IT provider goes into more detail.
How FTI does it
FTI is an engineering team. Our managed IT services are built and run by technical people, with a 24/7 help desk and senior engineers behind it. Some of our most successful relationships are with organizations that have their own IT staff; we work alongside them and make their jobs possible. We have been a technology company for 36 years, and the engineering habit has never changed.
