ReVision Energy Powers Up Its Workforce with Egnyte Enterprise File Services

“Egnyte was truly a blessing; the hybrid option was exactly what we were looking for and the best part is... it works.”."

Fred Greenhalgh

Digital Marketing Manager • Revision Energy

ReVision: New England’s Brightest Light in Solar

ReVision Energy, formerly known as Energyworks, LLC, opened its doors in 2003 and has installed more than 4,000 solar-power systems for homes and businesses throughout New England. The company and its 75 full-time employees offer a complete set of services including the design, installation and maintenance to earn its reputation as the most experienced renewable energy company in the region.

Challenges: Empowering a mobile workforce

Similar to many fast-growing companies, ReVision Energy experienced growth pains related to the storing and sharing of its sales documents, marketing materials, as well as files, notes, and photos associated with each project. The company resorted to transferring files between USB thumb drives before enabling file transfer available over virtual private networks (VPNs). However, with three offices and two-thirds of its workforce in the field during business hours, the company soon learned that its Internet-based VPN performance was less than optimal.

ReVision Energy considered its options, evaluating all the latest available technologies. One option was deploying an on-premises storage array at each of its offices. This proved to be cost-prohibitive for this small business because a separate file server was required as part of the installation, which would also increase operational (maintenance/support) costs.

The company then explored cloud-based approaches to enhance its existing storage and file-sharing infrastructure and to better support its mobile workforce. After installation of one such consumer solution, however, ReVision Energy determined that this option couldn’t meet its enterprise-grade requirements, in terms of both performance and reliability. The clincher was temporarily losing more than a terabyte of data due to a failure of one of its file servers, ReVision Energy had to restore all the lost data to the file server which cost them an entire working day without access to those files.

Benefits: The sustainable benefits of going hybrid

The solution for ReVision Energy was to “go hybrid,” a familiar concept in the Renewable Energy industry. The foundation for this solution was deploying cost-effective NETGEAR ReadyNAS systems in each of ReVision Energy’s three offices with Egnyte Storage Sync embedded. Egnyte’s Hybrid deployment allows users to store, share and access files from anywhere with any device, reducing the need for a separate file server deployment. The result enabled employees to sync data from every office as if they’re in one location, reducing operational costs while maintaining high-performance access locally to critical files.

ReVision Energy also achieved the benefits of enterprise mobility by allowing employees to share files from any mobile device while at a job site or en route to one. With the Egnyte solution, the company’s employees can now upload and share photos of job progress through public or private links with homeowners, supervisors, and co-workers in a matter of seconds. The ease-of-use of the Egnyte solution also made achieving these benefits without the oversight of a full IT department, a luxury an organization of ReVision Energy’s size could not afford.

“Egnyte has easily paid for itself and continues to time and time again. We can easily find files in seconds, make notes or edit them, and get back to focusing on making a difference for our clients.”

Fred Greenhalgh

Digital Marketing Manager