Burton Asset Management. Smart Technology in a Risky World.
When Kevin Burton steps onto a client’s campus, he’s focused on one thing: potential risks. “I live in a Jack Bauer world,” he says. “I spend my time making sure that people are prepared for the unforeseeable.”
Burton is the founder and CEO of Burton Asset Management (BAM), a business continuity and disaster recovery firm. It’s his job to imagine every possible hazard—fire, earthquake, flood, terrorist attack, pandemic—and determine how to protect his clients’ assets from their destructive power. Businesses, non-profits, municipalities, and even national governments come to Burton to map out the worst-case scenarios and arm themselves with a plan.
In other words, Burton’s job is to protect the world against disaster. And his technology of choice is the Mac.
The Mac means business
Not long ago, two days before a national holiday, Burton got a call from a web hosting company in Wisconsin whose data center had burned down. The recovery effort had tanked; the company had lost control of the process. Burton and his team chartered a plane, flew to Green Bay, and got the company back up and running within five business days.
“When we pulled out our Apple computers, those guys just smiled from ear to ear,” Burton says. “They knew we meant business. Because if the disaster recovery guys are carrying Macs, their computers are not going to crash. They’re not going to have a problem setting up a network. They’re not going to be looking around for step-by-step instructions for how to recover this or that system.”
In Burton’s business, competence and security are critical. And for both, BAM depends on Mac computers.
“In the PC world, you’re dealing with problems with security,” says Joe Fisher, Burton’s Senior Agent and a certified Microsoft engineer. “That’s not a problem on the Mac.”
Burton agrees that “you don’t have to be a professional risk assessor” to understand that PCs are riskier than Macs. “Let’s do a probability map. How many viruses have been written for the PC? 500,000? And how many for the Mac? And I don’t think I’ve ever seen one infect a Mac, of course.”
BAM has other powerful ways of protecting its data. They run a Mac mini as an in-house server, so they can do web and application development within a secure firewall. And attached to the Mac mini are two different 400-gig drive arrays, one for Time Machine backups and the other for data storage. Naturally, these external drives are removed nightly and stored in a secure location away from the office. That’s Disaster Planning 101.
Growth without growing pains
For Burton, who began as a sole proprietor, there was never a question about which platform to use for BAM. He’d made the switch to Apple years before, and as his business grows, his systems have scaled up with rewarding ease.
“We’ve had a 1200% increase in our computer footprint in the last two months alone,” he says. “And we did it without a single hiccup.”
As it has expanded, BAM has also kept budgets firmly in place. “PCs might initially cost a little less,” Burton says. “But there’s a difference. My agent is going to be fully functioning, without any technical issues, immediately.” And if he does have a problem? “We’re going to jump onto iChat, and I’m going to take control of his screen and fix it. Me, the CEO. I don’t need a sys admin. I don’t have a sys admin.”
As CEO, Burton is invested in satisfying his employees. By running an all-Mac business, he attracts emerging talent raised on iPods; in fact, he can hire Mac-fluent members of Generation Y away from other companies who aren’t keeping up. And even former PC users at BAM view the Mac as a retention tool. “It’s the simple things,” Burton explains. “The magnetic power cord. The light weight. Tons of power. Long battery life.”
It’s also the reliability. “The Mac operating system is so stable,” says Steven Jaeger, one of BAM’s creative agents. “I can have graphics applications like Maya and Flash and Photoshop open at the exact same time, and I zoom out and expose all of these screens with Exposé, and there’s no lag or crashing.”
The software, too, has made work easier. “We work with mountains of data,” Burton explains. “And I had an agent who was banging his head against the desk trying to get Excel to give him a spread graph of how many different types of computers were in a client’s office. I said, ‘You know, if all you’re looking for is the graph, just copy and paste that into Numbers and open the Inspector.’ The guy bought me lunch!”
Winning business with smart communication
At the core of BAM’s business is communication – in particular, communicating the unforeseen.
“We try to help people think about disasters in a way they can understand,” Burton says. “We use images. Simple pictures. This is your building. This is your building from space. Here are the problem areas.”
The Mac is critical to this kind of presentation. “The most important thing Macs enable us to do is rapidly visualize very complicated scenarios,” Burton explains. “Say we come to your campus to do an assessment. Within 24 hours of arrival, I can take pictures on the iPhone and create 3D files in Maya, convert it to a QuickTime, drop it into a Keynote, and fly you around your campus and show you all the weak points.”
With processes that fast, BAM gains a competitive edge, winning business over much larger and more established competitors, who can take far longer to produce the same kind of reports. In fact, most disaster recovery firms charge $10,000 - $15,000 to provide basic location data that Burton gives away for free—on an iPhone web app that his company developed.
Called History of Disasters, the app uses the location services device on the iPhone, or a ZIP code, to provide an instant report of all the recorded disasters in an area, usually about 50–100 years back in time. “Now you don’t have to argue with your boss about whether a disaster will happen or not,” Burton says. “You can just pull out your iPhone.”
Burton also wins business away from larger competitors by using Keynote for conference presentations. “I can create awesome 3D animations that carry over from one slide to the next. I can do that, and I’m the CEO. I don’t have to give it to an employee to make it happen.”
When communicating with clients, Burton and his agents get a lot of help from Pages. Often they have only a few minutes to whip out a great-looking schedule or announcement. “We’ll go to Pages, create a beautiful document with embedded pictures and a table of meeting schedules, and get that over to the client in a PDF in under ten minutes.”
For getting his message out, Burton is also a big fan of video. His film crew follows him to presentations and conferences, and Burton almost instantly gets the footage. “After I finish speaking, I walk up to the cameraman and say, ‘Can I rip that to my Air? Can I get a copy of that on DVD in QuickTime format?’ As soon as he hands it over to me, I can cut that thing up in iMovie and have it on YouTube in minutes.”
Collaboration – in the field and in the office
Of all the Mac applications that keep BAM operating smoothly, iChat is the most critical. The agents, spread around the country on assignment, constantly text each other and share files throughout the day.
Senior Agent Joe Fisher needs to maintain constant contact with the agents in the field. “Using iChat, I’m right there with them. When they have a question, or if they want to show me a file, I have them share their screen. It makes it so much easier.”
Even in the office, iChat makes instant collaboration possible, which results in getting more done, faster. The creatives at BAM use the screen-sharing feature to help resolve software questions. “Each person has different strengths,” Steven Jaeger explains. “Maybe one guy isn’t as proficient at Maya. He just shares his screen, and the other guy shows him how to do it. We don’t even have to get up out of our chairs.”
BAM also runs a Wiki—the one that’s built in to the Mac OS X Server—which allows onsite and offsite agents to upload documents, make changes, tag these changes, and download the new and better versions. “It’s gorgeous,” Fisher says. “It works beautifully right out of the box. And it’s a great way to increase efficiency and keep everyone on the same page—literally.”
“Say I figured out how to rebuild a script for a client’s email server that takes away five steps,” Burton explains. “I upload the script and I meta-tag it. Then if an agent logs on and searches for email exchange scripts, that will come to the top as the latest post or the most used post.”
The Wiki, iChat, screen sharing—they’re all communication tools that allow BAM to respond instantly to whatever arises. And that, of course, is precisely their business.
“The whole Apple experience has taught us how to communicate better with our customers,” Burton says, “and with each other. You know, there’s no reason why it should be hard. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to push the button and have it work. And it does.”
Photo Gallery
Keeping it green
Macs are integral to another aspect of Burton’s business: being green. “We’re using the latest MacBooks, iMacs, and Mac minis,” Burton says, “which are the greenest laptops and desktops on the planet.” And rather than set up shop in an office building, Burton chose to house his offices at his Arizona home, and to allow agents to work remotely. “We realized that only our managers and creatives needed to be here, at desks. It makes much more sense, environmentally and financially, for our agents to work remotely, from their locations around North America.” Using iPhones, iChat, and BAM’s Wiki, the agents maintain constant communication from wherever they are. And of the employees who work in BAM’s headquarters, only 2 of 10 drive in alone. The rest carpool and bike. Says Burton: “We’re not drawing down any more power from the grid than absolutely necessary.”
A very smart phone
At BAM, all managers have iPhones, and they use them constantly to talk and text. “We text like crazy,” CEO Kevin Burton explains. “It’s so rich to have the chat on-screen, and to have the thread of the conversation appear there, where we can see it.” And Burton is delighted this iPhone can fill so many needs at once. “I’m traveling constantly, and with the iPhone, it’s all there. I don’t want to carry a camera and an iPhone and a phone separately, and I don’t have to. With the iPhone, I can do conference calls. I can do visual voicemail. I can have a screen saver that’s a photo of my daughter. And I can listen to my music nonstop for 19 days and never hear the same song twice."
See how Burton Asset Management uses iPhone in their business. Learn more.
