Email us at sales@ocgl.net
Email us at sales@ocgl.net
Managed
Business Solutions
In a city where technology drives business success, partnering with the right IT consulting firm can make all the difference. OPUS stands as Vancouver’s leading IT consulting company. With over 20 years of experience, we’re proud to be the go-to choice for organizations across various industries looking for reliable, high-quality IT solutions. Whether you’re a small business in need of advanced security measures or a medium-sized firm aiming to enhance cloud infrastructure, our team of expert consultants has you covered.
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Businesses rarely call a consultant because everything is fine. In our experience it is usually one of four moments. A decision with a long shadow, such as a platform choice, an office move or a merger — something you will live with for five years and would rather not get wrong. A second opinion, where you have a proposal in hand and no independent way to judge it. Something that is not working, where costs have crept, performance is poor, or projects keep slipping and the cause is not obvious from inside. Or nobody owning the strategy, where IT gets handled but no one is steering it.
A roadmap turns IT from a series of surprises into a plan with a budget. We look at what you are running, what is approaching end of life, what your business plans require, and what it will realistically cost. You get a sequenced, prioritised view rather than a wish list. For businesses that need this continuously rather than once, we act as a virtual CIO: attending planning meetings, controlling the budget, and keeping security in the frame.
Roadmap is an overused word, so it is worth being concrete. Ours is a working document, not a slide deck, and it covers five things.
An asset and lifecycle position. Every server, switch, firewall, laptop and licence, with its age, warranty status and end-of-support date. Most of the unpleasant surprises in IT budgeting are things that quietly went end-of-life eighteen months ago.
A risk register in business language. Not a vulnerability scan. What could stop you trading, how likely it is, what it would cost, and what removing it would cost.
A sequenced plan. What to do this quarter, this year and next, in an order that respects dependencies — because you cannot sensibly move to the cloud on a network that will not carry it.
A budget with capital and operating split out. So finance can plan, and so you can see when a subscription is quietly replacing an asset.
The decisions you have already made. Written down, with the reasoning, so the next person to ask "why are we on this platform?" gets an answer instead of a shrug.
An independent review of your environment, your spend, or a proposal you have been given. We will tell you when the incumbent is doing a good job, because that is also a useful answer. Assessments are the most common way clients start with us: it is a bounded piece of work, it produces something you own, and it does not commit you to anything afterwards.
Migrations, consolidations, office builds and platform changes, run by people who have done them before. Because most project failures are planning failures rather than technical ones, we spend the time up front. Where the work touches the network or the server room, our IT infrastructure team delivers it directly, and where it moves workloads, our cloud migration practice takes it.
Where your obligations come from customers, insurers or regulators, we help translate them into controls you can actually operate, working alongside our cyber security practice. Cyber insurance renewals have become a common trigger: the questionnaire asks for controls that take months to put in place, and the honest answer is often not the one the form wants. We help you close the real gaps rather than the ones that are easiest to tick.
There are a lot of firms in this market and the websites all say similar things. Four questions separate them quickly.
Who actually does the work? Ask to meet the person who will be on your account, not the person selling. Our consultants average 15+ years of hands-on IT experience, and the people who design your environment are the people who support it.
What are they obliged to sell you? A firm that only resells one vendor will find that vendor is always the answer. We hold partnerships with Microsoft, RUCKUS and Nutanix, and we are a Sophos Platinum Solution Partner, one of a limited group in Canada — which gives us direct escalation and better pricing — but we are not obliged to recommend any of them, and we will say so when the right answer is something we do not sell.
Will they still be there at implementation? Plenty of consultancies hand over a document and leave. Ask what happens on day one of delivery.
Can they attend in person? Remote-only works until it does not. We attend on-site across Metro Vancouver, and we support clients across Canada, coast to coast.
Assessments and roadmaps are quoted as a fixed fee against a defined scope, so you know the cost before you commit. Project work is quoted per project. Ongoing vCIO involvement is a monthly retainer sized to how often you actually need us in the room — for most businesses that is quarterly planning plus availability in between, not a standing weekly meeting. Where consulting sits alongside day-to-day support, it is usually simpler to fold it into managed IT solutions rather than run two agreements.
Two things distinguish useful consulting from expensive documentation. The first is independence, covered above. The second is that we stay to implement. A recommendation nobody executes is worth nothing. Where you want us to deliver, our managed IT solutions and support teams pick the work up. Where you have your own team, we hand over properly and get out of the way — and if you have internal IT already, a co-managed arrangement is often a better fit than either extreme.
First, we listen. Not to your IT problems — to what the business is trying to do. Where you expect to be in three years, what is constraining you now, what has been tried. The technology conversation is far easier afterwards.
Next, we look. We document the current state including cost, risk and the things that only surface when you ask the right person. This usually takes one to two weeks and involves your team less than they fear.
Then we recommend. Options with trade-offs, costs and consequences, written so a non-technical board can follow them. Where we think one option is clearly right we say so; where it is a genuine judgement call, we say that too.
Finally, we help you act. Whether that is us delivering, your team delivering, or a third party we help you select and manage. You work with consultants who have run infrastructure, not analysts reading from a framework. Our support desk is open 6:00 am to 11:00 pm Pacific, seven days a week.
Why there are no client names here. We do not publish client company names, or the names of individuals, in any of our case studies. That is deliberate — out of respect for our clients’ privacy and for the security of their environments. Describing who runs which platform, and which weaknesses have recently been closed, is not information we are willing to put in public. Your organization would get exactly the same discretion.
The engagements below are real and the outcomes are as they happened. Where you need more than our word for that, we will arrange a reference meeting with an existing client — case by case, and with that client’s agreement. Summaries of every engagement we publish are collected on our case studies page.
A seniors’ care organization operating 26 locations across British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan came to us with a network that had stopped keeping up with the organization. The wired infrastructure had aged past the point of reliable service, wireless coverage was unreliable, and connectivity between locations failed constantly.
We started with a complete discovery of the entire network — every site documented, including the parts nobody had looked at in years. That became the basis for a new wired architecture covering all 26 locations. In parallel we produced wireless heat maps for each site individually, because a floor plan is not a coverage prediction, and we designed the new wireless architecture from those measured results.
The build standardised the organization on a full set of RUCKUS ICX switches, with different families chosen for different roles rather than one model everywhere, and RUCKUS Wi-Fi 6 access points throughout. All 26 sites are managed centrally through the RUCKUS One cloud console.
Network-related support tickets fell from eight to ten a day to roughly one. Most of what is left is internet service provider outages at the smaller community locations rather than anything inside the network itself. Connectivity between sites stabilised, wireless performance improved substantially, and the security of the wireless network was tightened in the process.
The work did not stop at the cutover. RUCKUS One gave the organization patch management it did not have before, so firmware currency is now maintained on a quarterly cycle rather than whenever something breaks. We also enabled automatic provisioning: every new switch installed anywhere in the network receives the correct configuration on its own. That is what keeps a standard actually standard as an estate of this size changes. A network that had been 26 separate problems is now one platform a single team can see and support.
A Vancouver cold-storage company was building a new facility and brought us in at the outset, before the design was fixed. That decision shaped everything that followed. We worked directly with the building architect and had full access to the floor plans, so the network was designed into the building rather than retrofitted around it afterwards.
The unusual requirement was temperature. The wireless network had to run continuously at around -20°C, which rules out most access points — standard indoor hardware is not built to sit in a freezer for years. We designed the wireless solution around the RUCKUS outdoor AP family, which is rated for exactly this kind of hostile environment. Because the building was new, we designed the wired network alongside it on RUCKUS ICX switches rather than inheriting someone else’s cabling decisions.
The client had not planned for edge security at all. We recommended it anyway: a pair of Sophos XGS firewalls in a high-availability failover configuration, with two internet service providers behind them. A single firewall and a single circuit are two single points of failure, and a new build is the cheapest moment in a facility’s life to remove both.
Planning took about five weeks, with site visits throughout construction. The go-live date was met and the systems activated without a single issue — which is the return on being brought in early rather than at handover.
A municipal client of roughly 70 users was running an on-premises Avaya PBX that had reached end of life. The immediate problem was support: getting help for a discontinued platform had become slow and expensive. The larger problem was that nothing could be improved — every request for a better call flow or a new capability ran into a system that was never going to receive another feature.
We started by documenting the phone system as it actually behaved rather than as it was originally designed: every call queue, every call flow, every routing rule and after-hours path. On a phone system that has been in place for years this is the work that decides whether a migration lands, because nobody remembers all of it, and the parts nobody remembers are the ones that generate complaints the week after cutover.
The replacement was built on Microsoft Teams, on top of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscriptions the client was already paying for, so telephony was added to a platform they already owned rather than bought as a separate system standing beside it. Calling runs on Teams Phone with Microsoft Calling Plans, so Microsoft carries the PSTN service directly. That route needs no session border controller of their own and no separate carrier contract to administer alongside it — which is a large part of where the saving came from.
The old reception board came out. Call flows were redesigned rather than copied across — a migration is the one good opportunity to fix routing everyone has been working around — and calling, meetings, chat and presence now sit in a single application. Staff also gained genuine mobile telephony through the Teams app, so a call to a desk number reaches the person rather than an empty office.
Measured against their original invoices, the client’s monthly telephony costs fell by 34% — and their capability went up rather than down. That is an unusual pairing, and it is the return on doing the discovery properly first.
We took over the sale and management of Microsoft 365 and Azure licensing for a non-profit organization with locations in British Columbia and Alberta. Two separate problems turned up, and neither of them was visible from an invoice.
On the Microsoft 365 side we audited what was actually assigned to whom, alongside the subscription version they were on. Licence estates drift: people leave, roles change, and nobody reconciles the assignment list against who is still there. Right-sizing what they held rather than simply renewing it cut their purchase costs by 5% within the non-profit pricing model they already qualified for, and the change of subscription version improved their security posture and their productivity capability in Teams at the same time.
Azure was the larger finding. They were buying compute on pay-as-you-go, which is the most expensive way to run a virtual machine, and had been for some time. The important step came before the recommendation: we confirmed the virtual machines were correctly sized first. Committing to reserved capacity on oversized machines locks the waste in for the length of the term, which is how cost-optimisation exercises end up saving nothing. Once the sizing was verified we moved them to Reserved Instances, and their Azure spend fell by 37%.
Neither saving cost them any capability. That is usually what a licensing and consumption review finds, and it is the argument for doing one before a renewal rather than after it.
Do we have to switch providers to work with you? No. Assessments and roadmaps are standalone. Plenty of clients use us for advice while someone else runs their day-to-day support, and if you do later decide to move, we have written about how a provider transition actually runs.
How long does an assessment take? For most small and mid-sized environments, two to three weeks from kickoff to the presented findings, depending on how quickly we can get access and time with your people.
Is this only for companies without internal IT? No. Some of our most useful engagements are with businesses that already have a capable internal team and want depth, an independent view, or cover for something outside their day job.
What does it cost? Fixed fee against a defined scope, quoted after a short scoping conversation. We have also published a 2026 pricing guide for managed IT support in Vancouver if you are trying to budget more broadly.
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