Bill Wilkins is a busy fellow these days and when he pauses for a discussion about IT shop projects coming up in his future, his response is clear. “Unified communications is big with us right now. We are walking out near the edge with some of this, and it is going to turn out real good,” he said with a smile in his voice.

Metalforming is a local company that manufactures for the construction industry. As the name implies, they form metal. A big product is their metal roofing system equipment, and while on the surface one might assume that IT would not be highly critical to their business, that is not so at all.

They are located in Switzerland, Germany, Australia and Taiwan. They have a worldwide network which requires an environment that can support multiple languages. That is a basic and fundamental requirement, so everything they do has to fit the world of Microsoft. They are into a Microsoft CRM 4.0 project and are optimistic about the increased capabilities it will deliver.

When Bill Wilkins starts rolling on about the many partners and exciting developments which are soon going to launch, he talks about Level 3, Onlink, and Georgia Tech. “We have really good partners and they are accomplishing some feats which are really interesting. Even the folks at Microsoft are proud of some the things they know will come from this project,” said Wilkins.

“Our team is proud of what we are doing and it is starting to worry our competitors. At the recent International Roofing Expo, the largest concentration of our competitors to be found on the floor was around our booth. They can see we are moving ahead with several innovations which are going to deliver good advantages to our partners. We are doing a web portal integration project which will bring all related data together in one place. Moving a lot of services into an online environment within the roofing industry is huge. No one else is even close to some of the things we are soon going to deliver. And yes, that is fun.” The words from Wilkins now seemed to sound more like an oral grin.

By Mike Adkinson

March 2010