Not a vendor.
An
extension of the team.
How Unite Communications got the specialized infrastructure expertise of a full IT team, for less than the cost of a single in-house hire.
Legacy infrastructure. Growing customer base.
No margin for downtime.
When Unite Communications came to us, they were running a growing telecom business on infrastructure that hadn't kept pace. Their customers, small and mid-sized businesses across Canada, relied on their platform for phone calls, messaging, faxing, virtual attendants. The kind of service where an outage isn't inconvenient, it's a business emergency for every customer they serve.
Modernizing that infrastructure the right way needed expertise that would be prohibitively expensive to hire full-time and risky to depend on a single person for. What they needed wasn't another employee. They needed a partner.
- 01 Modernize legacy infrastructure without disrupting customers who depend on 24/7 service.
- 02 Get specialized expertise without building an internal IT department.
- 03 Find a team that would grow with them, not disappear when things got complicated.
Design it right. Scale it with them.
Then
keep it that way.
We started by designing and deploying a new hyper-converged infrastructure, a resilient cluster built to handle Unite's workload today and grow with them tomorrow. When their customer base outgrew the original setup, we expanded it. When an after-hours outage revealed the need for continuous coverage, we brought their platform under our 24/7 NOC.
But the real work is what happens between the milestones. Rolling maintenance with zero-downtime patching. Quarterly health checks that catch drift before it becomes drama. Ongoing monitoring that flags problems before customers notice them. And when we saw an emerging risk, the possibility of a datacenter-level failure, we designed disaster recovery infrastructure to protect against it.
That's what "extension of the team" actually looks like: being close enough to see what's coming, and staying long enough to build for it.
Infrastructure design & deployment
Built for their workload today, sized to grow with them tomorrow, no rework required.
24/7 NOC coverage
Continuous monitoring on the systems where every minute of downtime affects real customers.
Zero-downtime maintenance
Rolling patches and upgrades scheduled around their operational reality, not ours.
Quarterly health checks
Deep reviews that catch drift, degradation, and risk before they become incidents.
Disaster recovery planning
Because a long-term partnership means thinking about the next disruption you haven't had yet, not just cleaning up after the last one.
You get an entire team of specialized experts for less than the cost of hiring a single in-house IT person.
A modern platform. A trusted partner.
Peace of mind.
Unite's infrastructure runs on a resilient, modern platform designed for the way they actually work. Their customers get the reliability they depend on. Their team gets the specialist expertise they couldn't practically hire for. And leadership gets something harder to quantify but easier to feel: the peace of mind that comes from knowing the infrastructure isn't their problem to solve alone.
The partnership has grown alongside their business, and continues to.
Don't just take our word for it
Working with Crafty Penguins never feels like dealing with an outsourced vendor, they genuinely feel like an integrated part of our internal team. They consistently think outside the box to solve complex challenges, and the outcomes of our tech situations are far superior to anything we could have achieved without them.
Beyond their technical expertise, the value is unmatched: you get an entire team of specialized experts for less than the cost of hiring a single in-house IT person. The peace of mind that comes with knowing our infrastructure is in their hands is invaluable.
If you run a high-availability operation and need reliable, innovative tech support, I would recommend Crafty Penguins anytime.
Working with similar organizations
Need an extension of your team?
Crafty Penguins helps growing companies get the specialized infrastructure expertise of a full IT team, without the overhead of building one.