Bick Group History

Driving greater performance from data centers
for more than four decades

In 1964, James Bick was a pioneer in his own right.  At a time when punch card systems were leading-edge technology, he understood the importance of anticipating and meeting business needs. Today, the company that bears his name, Bick Group, is still on the front edge of technology and business trends, enabling customers to gain the most value from their data centers to drive their businesses.  Here’s a look at how the Bick Group was built.

2000 - 2010
For the past decade, IT has become more and more important to businesses. Well-managed data centers can drive revenue, growth or a more competitive position.  That’s why keeping data centers up and running is paramount.  Bick Group continues to tap emerging technologies and develop new approaches to meet increasing demands for greener, more efficient and more reliable data centers, often with limited infrastructures and tight budgets.

With this latest technological wave, cloud computing is allowing clients to drive efficiencies and stretch resources like never before.  It’s a key part of the holistic approach Bick takes to the data center, and in early 2010, Bick acquired cloud computing expert, Blue Mountain Labs.

In the early 2000s, Bick Group began helping clients get the most out of this business-critical asset by performing assessments and implementing solutions that specifically close gaps and improve performance.  Clients were based throughout the United States. Today, Bick offers expertise worldwide on site and in the cloud so clients can take advantage of all the things technology can do for their businesses.  From IT strategy to data center consolidation, design-build and migration to implementing cloud architecture, Bick Group puts best practices to work in more than 1,000 data centers a year.

Clients include Fortune 500 companies, government agencies of all sizes, and many middle-market companies.  As each new wave of technology comes into the data center, Bick Group will continue to develop solutions for customers to gain the most value from all of their data center assets.

1980s – 1990s
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, IT became increasingly important to organizations. With this importance came C-suite expectations about availability and reliability. The industry responded by providing systems and designs that offered redundancy and resiliency. Bick Group increased its staff of in-house engineering and construction management to keep pace with the new complexity in system design and project delivery. But improved systems and design were only part of the issue. Uptime was still influenced by how well systems were maintained. Appreciating this, Bick Group developed Managed Maintenance Service, an offering that viewed data center maintenance differently.  Operators were faced with limited time and budget to manage a dozen maintenance vendors and ensure they were performing to best practice standards. Bick Group offered a highly qualified, single-source solution to managing maintenance to eliminate downtime.

1970s
In the early ‘70s, Bick Group formed a Service Group to answer the need for 24-hour repair services for data center critical support systems. Initially focused on break/fix repairs, the Service Group soon developed a more proactive approach to service. The group added Preventive Maintenance services that enabled clients to dramatically increase availability.

1964
When the computer industry was in its infancy, Jim Bick saw the need for specialized environments and systems to house and support the new, large, sensitive mainframe computers. In 1964, he founded Bick Corporation to address these special needs. The subsequent solutions Bick Group developed were the first-generation data centers.

In these early years, many of the computers—as well as the systems and equipment needed to support them — were literally just being invented. As a result, clients were unsure how to deploy these new systems and how to support them. Jim Bick sought out and found solutions. He mastered the technical requirements of these data centers and developed relationships with equipment vendors in essential disciplines that were required for the complete data center environment. Chief among the disciplines:  cooling; power conditioning, distribution and backup; fire detection and suppression; site monitoring; and access flooring.

From the beginning, Bick Group’s holistic approach to data centers has provided IT teams with turnkey solutions and single-source accountability.  As early IT teams were inundated with requests and overwhelmed with determining what IT technology to deploy, having a specialist address the critical environment was a tremendous benefit.