In the St. Louis area yesterday, I attended the ribbon cutting ceremony opening Maverick Technologies’ Global Support Center which is part of its new offering dubbed PlantFloor24.
The news item can be found at Automation World.
CEO Paul Galeski along with SVP Kirk Norris and Senior Consultant Peter Esparrago, met with me to explain the offering and what’s going on in the industry.
The consistent theme was that Maverick hires and trains people to be process engineering experts, not just service/support for one particular hardware platform or software application. Being platform agnostic, its support personnel can provide support to facilities with multiple platforms–a situation that sometimes occurs, probably more often than anyone wants.
Maverick has also invested in tools and training to support manufacturing IT including network monitoring and troubleshooting. This involves the second major theme of Maverick’s seeing itself as a “one-stop shop for the convergence of IT and OT.“
One interesting tidbit we got into was the company’s training offering for customers on troubleshooting skills for first-line employees.
Being one of the largest, if not the largest, systems integrator with many locations in the US and with partners covering much of the world, Maverick is able to deploy engineers and technicians rapidly when the operations center sees problems.
This is my second news item about remote support services (the other being Industrial Defender’s IT support solution) in a month. Technology suppliers have robust service solutions for their own products, but sometimes the finger-pointing about whose system is to blame can override a final solution. Independent integrators such as Maverick are now building expertise to fill that void.
Picture is Esparrago, me and Norris in a conference room overlooking the command center.
