RedBit builds custom solutions with Windows 11, Microsoft 365 and more

[News Bot]

When small businesses come to RedBit Development, they’re looking for help. They’re trying to figure out the best technology to help them reduce costs, increase profits and develop their missions, which in one recent award-winning example involved redirecting perfectly good food onto hungry people's plates instead of going into a landfill. RedBit – a small business itself with only 17 employees based in Ontario, Canada – responds with big solutions that include custom software, driven by Microsoft technology. Mark Arteaga, who founded RedBit in 2003 and serves as its president, says that a problem he sees with many of his customers is a “mishmash” of ways to share documents, conduct team meetings and handle a multitude of issues as they scale up. Oftentimes, the costs of dealing with that mishmash add up to much more than using a unified ecosystem such as Microsoft Azure, the Microsoft 365 Power Platform and Windows 11 Pro.

“We help organizations – whether they’re small businesses, startups or large enterprises, nonprofits or for-profits – leverage technology to help them reach their goals,” says Arteaga, whose business works mostly with companies based in North America. RedBit can tailor solutions to specific situations and needs, with the aim of consolidating and standardizing processes to make them more efficient, including automation. The three main services RedBit focuses on are: building custom applications, modernization (adding mobile services) and cloud adoption. “A lot of organizations we meet are still running servers. Sometimes you need to run a server within your organization, but a lot of companies don't need that server. We migrate them to Microsoft Azure, put them in the cloud, secure and lock them down, so only the team members or the employees can access them,” Arteaga says. “Then they'll be able to continue to do their work.” Hazel Van der Werken, head of operations and customer success at RedBit since 2016, says everything the company does happens in Microsoft Azure. They’re running projects using Azure DevOps, automating pipelines and using some of the Azure Cognitive services. [caption id=attachment_177881" align="alignnone" width="1024]https://blogs.windows.com/wp-content/uploads/prod/sites/2/2022/11/Hybrid-work-1024x768.jpg Hybrid work[/caption] “They want to be able to run their businesses using platforms that will help them and not hinder them. Microsoft products offer all that a small business really could need or want in this regard, which brings me to another pain point we see working with small businesses, is that they tend to have technology in place that is old. There's not much integration across solutions,” says Van der Werken. “Microsoft 365, Teams, Office, Azure, Windows 11 – they all help get our clients up and running on a cohesive platform upon which they can grow and build their businesses.” Van der Werken says that Second Harvest’s accelerated timeline – which went from three years of nationalizing the system across Canada to weeks – was a big challenge for RedBit, but one they took on, conducting a tech overhaul and fast-tracking scalability and performance to address those critical needs. Microsoft recognized the work RedBit did with Second Harvest with a Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Community Response in 2020. “We're using technology to not only help our customers meet their business goals, but also to leave a positive impact in the world along the way,” she says. “It really gives a lot more motivation and adds to that passion of how you can use technology to create good in the world.” Lead photo: Mark Arteaga, president of RedBit

 

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