Cheshire and Apex Technology agree on new contract

CHESHIRE – Earlier this summer councilors unanimously backed a new three-year contract with the information technology company that has been part of the city since 2011.

Last month, councilors voted to contract with Apex Technology Group for technology services for the city and school district.

The annual cost will be $331,080, with a term from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2025. The new contract costs the city $93,000 more per year than its recent terms with Apex.

Steve Carroll, chairman of the city’s technology study group, said the city originally employed two computer technicians. When the study group was formed in 2011, however, Carroll, along with other city officials, determined that the approach was not effective.

“Around 2011 I was asked by the then City Manager to get involved with the Technology Study Group and it quickly became apparent that the state of our technology in Cheshire was like a dumpster fire “Carroll said. “If it wasn’t broken, it was going to break soon. This is when the technology group was born.

The technology group employed Apex as consultants, tasked with identifying “critical items” that needed to be addressed, according to Carroll.

“They kept going and, really, we’ve worked it out so far,” Carroll said. “I think we have a top-notch network.”

Carroll added that hiring two technicians now, who would be higher-level positions and require benefits, would cost the city at least $350,000 a year. Not only would hiring two new employees be expensive, but their knowledge would be limited.

“They won’t know everything about everything because there aren’t two technicians or two people in the world who know everything about everything,” Carroll said. “What you gain with Apex is that you have access to all of their expertise.”

Apex and the technology study group have already planned to further improve the city’s technology services, including the implementation of disaster recovery, which would allow the city to use cloud services to recover data. lost.

Apex also proposed the co-location of a data center, which Carroll said the city did not have the infrastructure or space to host due to specific requirements such as temperature, humidity and fire prevention.

“We don’t really have the environmental conditions to support that here, unless you want to make a capital investment,” Carroll said.

Collocating elsewhere “mitigates the top-down capital expenditure” that the city would otherwise have to invest, Carroll added.

Councilman Peter Talbot, who is also part of the technology group, agreed with Carroll.

“The board has been extremely supportive of capital money over the years,” Talbot said. “Before it was a lot (higher fund requests) but we got, in 11 years, got ourselves into maintenance status rather than making up for lost time fixing everything.”