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"Kerio is one of our very best partners. Support is absolutely fantastic, and available at all times. There's always someone we can talk to directly."
Jony Holt, Founder Ronin
Ronin, a full IT-services provider from Fresno, California, is a fast-growing cloud-services business built on Kerio and the cloud. The business model is unusual in that Kerio products are bundled-in within an overall service fee. Ronin gives its clients everything they need in an all-inclusive package.
This is a business that's all about relationships, trust, and added value. By providing a complete service – and doing it well – Ronin is so deeply embedded in the life of its clients, they're not tempted to look elsewhere for IT service provision.
Ronin was created in 2008 by a former Apple employee called Jony Holt. The company has grown to a turnover of around US$0.75m through Jony's single-minded focus on service and brand differentiation. His customers operate in the agricultural, legal, and medical sectors.
"I set out to create an everything-in IT service in a box," he says. "That's my vision for the company. I want to replace the traditional break-fix relationship with a complete IT service based on a single point of contact for one set price that never changes."
Kerio and the cloud are fundamental to Jony's vision. But when he set up Ronin, he'd never heard of Kerio. The connection came unexpectedly when he asked a friend who worked for Microsoft for his thoughts on Exchange. The friend recommended Kerio instead, and Jony hasn't looked back since.
"I took to Kerio Connect for email and messaging straight away," he recalls. "I enjoyed it immensely because it was so easy to set up."
Jony has since brought every Kerio product into his business. Ronin now has close to 700 users on its Kerio Connect mail platform, and Kerio accounts for between 25% and 30% of Ronin's business.
"Kerio makes us really attractive to customers," says Jony. "Because email, phone, and firewall are the fundamentals of business infrastructure, clients see plenty of value in them. It's all about good customer-relationship management."
By integrating Kerio into every aspect of the business, Jony has increased adoption levels. Customers are much more likely to try new applications if there's no additional cost and no risk.
"We use Kerio to grow the business," he says. "Our ability to let customers experiment is what makes us really dynamic. There's no hard-sell: our customers discover for themselves that Kerio does things more elegantly – that it helps them work in smarter ways."
Ronin is an entirely cloud-based operation, providing hosted mail and phone services via a large fibre connection with 99.99% uptime.
He says: "We're essentially a data centre with a fully redundant network. All Kerio services are hosted by us. The advantage is that there are no upfront costs for hardware. More importantly, we know that we can provide a service and know that it will work."
Kerio is a good fit for Ronin because it's at home with PC and Mac. Ronin can therefore split its four-person technical team between its PC and Mac customers – two experts each. The company is also a member of the Apple Consultants Network.
"Kerio is one of the only mail servers that run on Mac," explains Jony. "If our customers want to switch from PC to Mac and still keep their own mail server, they can."
More than anything, it's the people at Kerio that make the company his ideal business partner. "Kerio is one of our very best partners. Support is absolutely fantastic, and available at all times. There's always someone we can talk to directly."
Jony is also a fan of Kerio's training program: "Kerio University is great. It's good that they test partners but, for a competent professional, the tests are easy. There's nothing convoluted about Kerio: for ease of use, the difference between Kerio and other providers is like night and day."
Above all, Jony thinks that Kerio is a business opportunity bursting with potential. For an IT organization with ambition, Kerio can be transformative.
"In this business you're a fish in a very big sea," he says. "To stand out, you have to be different – you have to make your offer compelling. Luckily Kerio gives you a great framework to work with. It's up to you to get creative and integrate its services – to use it to create your own unique service offering."
