For over 30 years, Mainline Information Systems Inc. specialized in hardware, mainly hardware reselling. Within the past decade, however, the company transformed itself into a systems integrator, specializing in assisting its clients with cloud transformation solutions, whether it’s software, services or even staffing.

The pandemic accelerated transformation efforts, challenging businesses everywhere with an incentive to figure out digital transformation and cloud migration solutions. And as the edge continued to gain momentum and popularity, Mainline solidified networking and security as its main priorities.

“The very first thing we saw over the initial six months was most companies had to transform immediately within the first 30 to 90 days to allow their workforce to work from home,” said David Burrows (pictured, left), president of Barometer Capital Management and account executive at Mainline. “We’re seeing on the back end that time, the value in terms of investment, is even more important because some businesses have been significantly impacted from not only cash flow, but certainly in terms of profitability during this time.”

Burrows and Marie Ashway (pictured, right), director of marketing at Mainline Information Systems, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Think event. They discussed how COVID accelerated digital transformations, life after the pandemic, the future of Mainline and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Spending creeps up

2021 is expected to be large in IT spend due to initiatives that were formerly on hold finally being able to come to fruition after the pandemic’s slowdown. And another shift is going to happen soon, according to Ashway.

“Maybe businesses are going to go back and try to pick up where they were before COVID and now start working on more of … the application modernization initiatives that were in mind,” she said.

Mainline has its sights set on a brighter future, with a 30+ year partnership with IBM in its arsenal to help secure its visions.

“We’re going to continue to grow and enhance our services business because we’ve got quite a large services business, whether it’s implementation services, we do manage services, we have staffing services,” Burrows said. “I think you’re going to see we’re still going to continue to grow that business, because that is a piece where companies don’t want to worry about running all of that. They want to know that their system’s going to be running 24/7 and if something happens, they could pick up the phone and call Mainline and we can help them get things corrected.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE