APRIL 2017 | YOUR COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
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Local entrepreneur creates cloud, phone system By: Marisa Gottesman Associate Editor
market, downloaded tutorials and began to figure out how to create his own voice over internet protocol system.
Florida in 2009. “It was just me,” he said. “I was billing by the hour.” One day he was proposing his services to a potential client. Instead of following his usual pitch of explaining the cost of what it would be to build the company its own server to store information, he also offered to provide it as a service on his own server. The issue: that server didn’t exist. When the client opted for the latter option, Bucher said he had less than a month to launch a server that would house all the information for his client.
When Eric Bucher received his first computer as a Christmas present from his parents, the first thing the 12 year old did was take it apart.
“It was a major investment,” he said. “I built it myself. I developed it, engineered it and put it together.” What started holding just four terabytes of data is now storing 100 terabytes, he said.
Now, he has built his own private cloud storage and phone system.
But creating a new product is something Bucher has done before. In high school, he created the first website his school ever had. A year later, the Kentucky school implemented a web design course. The class is still offered and students who take it still maintain the website.
Bucher owns four businesses and is constantly keeping up with the ever-changing technology in the IT world.
“I have always been an entrepreneur,” he said. “I have always enjoyed creating new things.”
His started his first business Quantified IT after he left a job in Jacksonville. Working in IT for someone else, he said he helped grow the company from five clients to 25 clients. When he asked for a raise and was offered $1,000 for his work, he said he decided to leave. He said some of his accounts followed him, which led to his former employer suing him. Ultimately, they settled out of court and Bucher began his own venture in South
His latest invention deals with phone systems. When he learned how much one of his clients was spending on their phone system, he said he knew he could probably create a better, more efficient system for less.
He put it back together of course, but not before he requested extra RAM and other necessities to build the computer he wanted.
So, for eight weeks, he spent 20 hours a day every day learning everything he could learn about phone systems. He said he bought every system on the
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Eventually, he figured it out and launched it at his company’s Quantified IT offices. When the phones began to ring, he said he knew it was a service he could offer to other businesses. In January 2016, he launched Call Sprout. He said it has grown organically since its inception by 37 percent. For the first time, he is bringing in sales representatives and estimates the phone business will overtake his IT company in growth
by summertime. He said the company has clients all over the country as well as local businesses. “It’s been super successful,” he said. When he isn’t coming up with new ways to make technology easier, he can be found volunteering his time with Habitat for Humanity of South Palm Beach County where he is a board member. “There are tons of successful people who do nothing to give back,” he said. “I wanted to give back.”