Industries Overview

Our core disciplines and service lines are “industry agnostic”, and we have a proven track record of entering new industries and rapidly providing valuable service.

Nonetheless, thanks mostly to referrals from loyal clients, we have established industry expertise in the educational, legal and real estate industries.

Our Education Expertise

Since it was founded, Ascendant has extensively served the education market. Clients include public K12 school districts (our largest educates 58,000 students at 48 sites), private schools, major universities, and testing/certification services.

We’ve had the opportunity to provide a broad range of services for our education clients, including:

• Program management and change leadership for institution-wide initiatives, such as: student information systems, wide area networks, large scale personal computer hardware and software upgrades, and email systems.
• Assistance with technology strategy, such as: organizational assessments and reorganizations; secure network and infrastructure design; project portfolio management; operational and help desk improvements; and facilitation and presentations to senior management and boards regarding technology.
• Project management for technology initiatives, such as: secure remote access solutions; portals; wireless deployments; anti-virus solutions; and security enhancements.
• Technology selection, including the preparation of request for proposals (RFPs) and management (as a trusted buyers agent) of the selection processes.

We love serving this market. We are proud and privileged to be improving the quality (and lowering the cost) of education through the use of innovation and new technologies – and we believe we can help other institutions refine and achieve their technology objectives.

Legal Industry Expertise

Our team has broad experience, both as consultants and staff, with a sizeable number of middle and large sized (Am Law 200) firms.

Our legal clients depend on information system, requiring systems that are always available and completely confidential. Needless to say, we find this a very challenging environment for making major changes in information technology – and we have consistently met this challenge across a number of large, intrusive projects.

Our legal industry projects include:

• Document management systems
• Firm-wide personal computer hardware and software replacement
• Electronic mail and integrated messaging solutions
• Litigation support applications
• Remote access solutions
• Time and billing systems
• Security infrastructure
• Training and change leadership programs
• Technology strategy development with IT management and committee leadership
• Business continuity plans
• Information (matter) lifecycle management

Real Estate Expertise

Our founder has a track record of successful projects in the real estate industry, holds a California Real Estate Broker’s license, and is on the board of a property management company. Ascendant completed several, significant real estate projects:

• Led a migration and integration program for a major commercial real estate venture that had acquired a competitor. The program involved migrating or integrating all the acquired company’s users, systems, data, hardware and networks.
• Assisted a leading real estate trade organization to develop their telecommunications strategy.