Business View - February 2016 59
and fully outsourced IT and voice systems implemen-
tation and support services with both onsite and re-
mote delivery models.
Luca Jacobellis, Cal Net’s President, narrates the sto-
ry of the company’s founding 20 years ago by Zack
Shuler: “His background was a PC salesman at Circuit
City,” Jacobellis begins. “People would buy their Pack-
ard-Bell PCs and say, ‘This is the first computer I ever
had; can you help me set it up?’ And their policy was
that they couldn’t. He got asked that enough times
and said, ‘You know what? There might be a business
here.’ He quit, made business cards, put special codes
on the back of each one of them for the different sales
reps he was friends with at the store and said, ‘Hey
guys – every time you sell a PC, if you hand out my
card and they call me, I’ll pay you a little commission.’
And a business was born, focused on home comput-
ing needs and support. Within 18 months, he had 500
customers.”
Jacobellis continues: “In ’97 or ’98, Zack got his first
business customer and it was an arrangement where
he would go there on a schedule, every week. They
had computers and they would break. They didn’t have
a need for someone there 40 hours a week, but this
small business needed help on a recurring basis. So,
he was there four to eight hours a week. He would
drive there, and go help them – setting up new equip-
ment, repairing something like if a CD-ROM broke, or
RAM was bad – hardware things like that. It was soft-
ware in the days of the Windows NT network and ’98
workstations, so it was supporting those things and
the applications, email systems, early versions of Ex-
change - a lot of internet support. Back in those days
businesses were getting DSL; it’s pretty unreliable and
breaks all the time.”
Within a few years, Shuler was servicing approximately
700 home clients. “But they’d call maybe once a year,
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Cal Net Technology Group
WHAT:
Southern California’s premier IT services
provider
WHERE:
Chatsworth, California
WEBSITE
:
TECHNOLOGY
