James Beane

Yardi

By Leah Etling on Jan 14, 2013 in People

James Beane is one of those rare individuals who can navigate the worlds of back end technical parlance and simple, user-friendly explanations of computing concepts with equal ease. For Yardi’s Manager of Cloud Services, communication is the most important aspect of IT.

James’ job description includes answering questions from clients about how Yardi’s Application Service Provider team can make their lives easier and their businesses more efficient. He’s an expert on disaster recovery and business continuity, key processes that provide peace of mind for companies with invaluable business data stored on remote servers.

Yardi has opened communication pathways between ASP and clients in recent years, making it easier for executives and administrators to pick up the phone and reach out to James or one of his colleagues on the ASP team and get their hosting questions answered.

“We’ve cleared channels of communication with our ASP Hotline, for our hosted clients that have outages, ‘We cannot access Voyager; The report isn’t processing.’ We’ve implemented things like that so our clients can pick up the batline and say ‘I need help,’ and get the same service level that they would from an internal IT team,” James explained.

Yardi has also greatly expanded off-site hosting services for clients that take much of the technology heavy lifting off the table for companies of all sizes. Handing hosting responsibility over to the industry leading software developer and application service provider makes good business sense.

“Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time supporting clients’ environments, with 3,000-some clients hosted and 11,000 network devices run,” James noted. “We can help our clients take the guesswork out of it and focus on what they can do really well, which is manage their properties.”

Just past his ten year service mark with Yardi, James has grown with the company. He started on the corporate IT team as a junior network administrator and now manages the hosted exchange and cloud services solutions for Yardi clients around the globe.

“I really like talking to clients, supporting our sales staff, and helping people understand what we do. I like helping people,” he shared.

A native of Santa Barbara and a graduate of Santa Barbara High School, James and his wife Diane are the proud parents of Hanna, 5, and Dominic, 2-and-a-half. A dedicated family man, he loves spending time with his family at the beach, the park, and taking short trips to Disneyland and Diane’s hometown of Santa Monica.

He loves movies and has been known to play a little Minecraft if he finds any extra spare time.  If you’ve seen him hard at work with his sleeves rolled up, you may have noticed his elaborate and artistic tattoos. Covering both arms, the imagery is inspired by Native American art and symbolism on his right arm, and Egyptian deities and beliefs on his left. The freehand work of Santa Barbara tattoo artist Sebastian Orth, the ink on his right arm speaks to his personal values: “I’ve always been a fan of the Native American belief system – take care of family, take care of those around you, and be aware of your surroundings.”

Taking care of those around you doesn’t stop at his own front doorstep. For the last 12 years, James has also been a member of the Santa Barbara Masonic Lodge No. 192, established in 1868. In 2006, he served as the youngest ever Master of the Lodge and is now a Past Master, a title he’ll hold for life. This year, he served on the Lodge Hall Association board of directors.

Attracted to the organization because it practices quiet community service without looking for recognition and reward, James waited patiently outside the door for a member to emerge from a meeting so he could ask about joining the Masons.

Recently, he assisted with internal Masonic legislation that will provide for perpetual preservation of the downtown Santa Barbara Masonic Center on East Carrillo Street by the Grand Lodge of California, even if a local Masonic chapter was no longer active. He has worked with the Masons on behalf of a center for childhood speech and language disorders, the Shriners Hospitals for Children, and a children’s fingerprint and photo ID program that is offered free to parents at the Santa Barbara County Fair each year.

“It is good work with good people that share some common threads,” James said.  “It’s a cool organization that believes in philanthropy and believes in helping those who need help, but without a lot of the glory that sometimes comes with it. It’s nice to help because help is needed, as opposed to helping because you want the attention.”

Spend a little time talking to James and you’ll soon learn that he is definitely not out to draw attention to himself.  If you’ve met him at a Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference, he was likely in the midst of answering a client’s question or helping a Yardi colleague with whatever task at hand needed to get done.

Describing himself as shy, he’d much prefer to put the spotlight on others and their accomplishments. When we asked him about his team, he quickly broadened the description from the three people who report directly to him to give credit to the hosting technicians, database administrators, Help Desk technicians, network administrators and admin support staff who make hosting thousands of clients a seamless process.

“I want them to be mentioned, because none of this would be possible without the amazing staff that we have,” he said. Helping get the job done without asking for attention is clearly something that applies not just to James’ philanthropic efforts, but professional life as well.