Founded in 1996, Little Rock’s Mainstream Technologies began as a custom software company, streamlining processes for clients and providing capacity, skills and experience. As a managed service provider, Mainstream operates the day-to-day technology assets of organizations.
“The advantages to that are you’re hiring the whole company versus an individual,” said John Burgess, president of Mainstream. “You get a breadth of skills to address a technological environment that is increasingly more complicated. It’s difficult for a smaller business to have one person who can be an expert in everything. With Mainstream Technologies, this business gets access to skilled experts with broad experience and expertise.”
Burgess said because technology is becoming more essential every day to how businesses function, another advantage of hiring a managed service provider is that there is no downtime or days off for information-technology staff.
“If you have a small staff or one-person IT department, and it’s after hours when an emergency happens, you may or may not be able to respond to an emergency in enough time to minimize or mitigate downtime,” he said. “With a managed service provider, we are always available. There’s an economy-of-scale aspect. Mainstream can dedicate resources to training and tools that most organizations can’t. It’s not just a matter of money; it’s about the tool, then having someone skilled to manage the tool. We can provide this to organizations who cannot afford the time or money to do so themselves. This allows the organization to focus on the business they know well while we manage tools, backup solutions, email security and monitoring. One of our main value propositions is we free you up to pursue what you do best while we manage technology and systems.”
Working together with managed services is cybersecurity, which is becoming more sophisticated with the advent of artificial intelligence. Burgess said while cyberattacks and hacking are an unfortunate way of life, Mainstream Technologies focuses on providing secure systems today and the future.
“Cybersecurity isn’t a technology problem; it’s a business problem,” he said. “Everybody knows somebody who has been affected, and there are increasingly severe tales of woe about what happened when someone was hacked. A lot of times, organizations are put out of business because they cannot recover from an event like this, which is equal to the business-level risk of a fire, flood or tornado. The reality is that there’s a whole shadow economy of criminals who make their money by harming our business structure, and community and governmental leaders need to start approaching this as a business-level risk.
“We have hundreds of years of communal experience in dealing with floods and fires and tornadoes, and we have come to understand that those happenings are facts of doing business. While we are in the early stages of this, I think cyberattacks are going to become accepted as a risk equal to these natural disasters.”
Looking further into 2024 and beyond, Burgess said getting businesses to understand their information and security is a business issue instead of simply a technological one is what tech companies will be focused on.
“Getting a business owner to understand that their information — inventory, customer contacts, billing, etc. — is their treasure is the first step in protecting it effectively,” he said. “Once we know that, we can determine the threats to that treasure and how to protect it. Once a company understands the risks, they can more intelligently deploy solutions cost effectively to stop it. You don’t need to buy a cannon to protect you from a fly problem. We can help find a natural solution to a problem then provide the services and tools to secure that solution.”
A longtime advocate of STEM education, Burgess sees it as an avenue for increased security and an economic engine for areas throughout Arkansas.
“I got a STEM education in Saline County, and it has served me well,” he said. “With more of our workforce working remotely and doing so effectively, I think STEM can be the catalyst for economic development in areas of our state that, historically, have a dwindling population. What if a student in the Delta can take STEM classes, attend college online and obtain a well-paying job — and he never has to leave his hometown? What if he can then purchase a house in his hometown? He’ll have to have access to the necessities of daily life, and that will attract commerce to the area, which will only increase that community’s economy and attract more. It’s a driving factor now in our commerce, and the need will only broaden as we move into 2030 and beyond.”
