Artectis employees get assistance from Chief Operating Officer “”Skip” Wagner (center) in migrating a server for an overseas customer.

Thanks to Defender story, county’s new tech business catches the eye of CNN –

Story by Patricia Beech –
Photo by Mark Carpenter –

Local officials were among the nearly 100 people on hand on Saturday, March 24 for the grand opening of a new high-tech business in Manchester.
The Adams County Board of Commissioners expressed their support for the new company created by local entrepreneurs C.L. “Skip”Wagner and Zane Mingee.
“We encourage them in their endeavor to provide a quality IT server business through Artectis, and we commend them for creating new jobs in Adams County and utilizing the local workforce,” said the Commissioners in a joint statement to The Defender.
Artectis, an IT (Information Technology) Service company which supports and maintains computer servers for companies that collect data for market research, began formal operations one week earlier than was expected.
“Our employees willingly gave up their last weekend off before we start running 24-7’s,” said Wagner, the company’s Business Development Manager.  “They were supposed to have another week of live on-the-job training, but our client needed us to start earlier than planned, and our workers really stepped up to the plate for us.”
Not surprisingly, Artectis workers express excitement about being on the ground floor of the new enterprise.
“Even when I’m not scheduled to work, I’ll stop by the office to see how things are going,” said employee Damien Monroe. “We’re all very supportive of each other because we all need to succeed for this idea to work.”
Many hope that the company will develop into something good for the county, especially in light of DP&L’s planned departure in June 2018.
“This is a great thing for our village,” said Manchester Councilwoman Christine Henderson.  “Having new employees will certainly benefit our local businesses – I think it’s a start of bigger and better things for our town.”
The opening of a high-tech business in Adams County has also drawn attention from far-flung companies looking to bring their outsourced IT jobs back to America.
A March 15 article in The People’s Defender, “Opening the door for high-tech jobs in Adams County”, recently caught the attention of a senior official with CNN’s IT department who then contacted Wagner.
“He could hardly believe what he’d read – that we were doing this kind of work because he does the same thing day in and day out with people overseas,” said Wagner. “They’re interested in trying to have us do some of the support for CNN servers so they can bring some of their outsourced business back to America.” Wagner said he would be meeting with the news agency official in the near future.
Despite having been open less than one week, Wagner says the company is preparing to take on another contract and will be bringing in an apprentice during their second week of operation.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to go another 30 days without bringing in more people,” he said. “In one year we anticipate having 15-18 full-time, good-wage-earning employees – that’s just off one contract which we won sight unseen from a company that has been following our progress and wanted to do a trial run with us to see how we did – it could lead to many more IT jobs in this area.”
Wagner says he feels somewhat vindicated after facing intense skepticism from people who didn’t believe he could successfully bring  T jobs into the county. He credits the company’s employees with making the idea a reality.
“Just to see it actually working is amazing,” he said. “ Despite the early start our folks jumped in and rose to the challenge – it wasn’t easy, but anything worth doing isn’t usually easy.”