TSG Stays on the Cutting Edge of Computer Technology | News, Sports, Jobs

TRIADELPHIA — When times change, businesses must change with the times in order to stay current — and that fact couldn’t be more true in the tech industry and for companies like TSG.

With its beginnings reaching back to 1985, the local company has truly evolved in many different ways over the past four decades.

Mike Bizanovich, the company’s founder and owner, started the business as a one-man venture. He hired his first employee in 1986, and the company has continued to grow ever since then, taking on the name Technology Services Group Inc., or TSG, in 2001.

“It would be interesting to compare photos of what our desks looked like back then versus now,” Bizanovich said. “A mouse was almost as big as a coffee mug, and I remember having a tiny monitor that displayed a maximum of 40 characters,” he laughed. “We’ve really come a ways.”

Now headquartered at 101 Sims Circle at The Highlands, TSG serves clients with locations all over the nation.

“The service part of the business has always been what has driven the company,” Bizanovich said. “We can’t just sell products. You’ve got to be able to back it up with service. All of our folks follow that same mindset, that we’re there for meeting our customers’ needs through service.”

TSG has two primary sides of the company — the Information Technology, or IT, infrastructure side and the Creative Division.

For the IT side, the business focuses on personal computer networking — taking desktop machines and networking those PCs together in a local area network or wide area network.

“A lot of our clients have multiple locations, so we make it possible for them to communicate between their branches,” he said.

“Some of those are nationwide with offices in California and Chicago, or Denver and Wheeling. So we make all that work.”

The company sells the products and implements the services to get them up and running to meet their clients’ needs.

“Recently, computer security has become vital,” Bizanovich said. “It’s always been important, but these days with all of the threats that are out there, a big part of what we do is partner with security providers to make sure that all of these individual machines and servers that we deal with are protected. That’s a huge part of what we do.”

Bizanovich added that some of TSG’s bigger clients often choose not to have their file server on site, so TGS partners with large data centers that house all of the file servers and backups. That keeps the big, heavy hardware off of a client’s premises and at a location that can be more secure and cost effective for them.

The IT side of the business also has a help desk to assist with resolving problems for customers. The company has engineers on hand who can come out on location to help solve issues if needed.

Another very popular offering by TSG lately is voice over IP technology, replacing traditional telephone systems. Bizanovich said the VoIP systems are more affordable in most cases and are “function-rich” because of their interface with the company’s computer network.

“A lot of companies are adopting that technology,” he said.

Under the Creative Division at TSG, the company does website design and development.

“We build custom websites, branded for the individual needs and wants of the customer,” Bizanovich said. “We have our own content management system that we’ve developed, which allows an end user to make changes to their own website without having to have a computer science degree. If they’ve got some basic web processing skills, they can manage their own website using the framework that we’ve developed.”

Custom web applications are also handled by TSG to help clients do business the way they want to do business, Bizanovich noted.

“Today, that’s a big piece of what we do,” he said, explaining that some applications are smaller and some are company-wide. These features can be for strictly internal operations or customer-facing pieces, or even big applications outside of their own business that pass data back and forth between vendors.

The company also designs IOS and Android mobile apps for both platforms that can integrate with bigger systems.

TSG developed a popular and extremely useful product known as SmartSite, which makes it easy for non-technical staff to update their website while simultaneously pushing key information to social media, to text message recipients or to email. This has become key for clients such as health departments, emergency management agencies or even public schools that need to push notices out immediately to a group of targeted recipients in an efficient way.

Bizanovich said that most of TSG’s IT clients are small and medium-sized businesses with home bases in Southeastern Ohio, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania as the primary footprint.

“We have boots on the ground in those locations if necessary,” he said of the service engineers, adding that some of the clients may be based in the region but have offices on their network all across the U.S.

“But on the Creative Division side, we build websites and web apps for companies all over the country, because we don’t have to have boots on the ground every day for that. A Zoom or Teams meeting can accommodate that.”

TSG has grown to a company with 25 employees today.

“We are ever changing,” Bizanovich said, explaining that the Ohio Valley has an advantage in a way when it comes to new technology. He said when big metro areas jump on the newest trends, they don’t always stick.

“We can wait a few months before determining what the next stage of industry is doing,” he said.

“That’s when we hop on board and get smart in that particular topic, then can run with it and bring it to our customers rather than take a bunch of new toys to the customer and six months later a related company is suddenly out of business, the tech doesn’t work, a new company takes over that sector or something else happens.”

New video and photo capabilities are the hottest new integrations in web design, he indicated. And there’s always something new coming down the road.

“We’re constantly learning,” Bizanovich said, noting that TSG relies on its staff to keep up on the industry’s latest developments.

“We expect our team to bring us new ideas, because they’re smart people. We may want to implement a new feature that could be good for our customers.”

And customers also help keep TSG on the cutting edge, he said.

“In many cases, suggestions they make turn around as a piece to offer other clients because it’s a good idea,” Bizanovich noted. “It’s a constant learning process, but we’re driven to do that. We all love tech. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing.”