About Us
Bridge IT — Solving for “Why”
About Us
In 2015, tech industry veterans Matthew Baggett and Alex Gonikman realized the Value Added Resale (VAR) industry had a glaring whitespace. While there was no shortage of resellers who could get standard hardware from the major firms into the hands of enterprise customers, there were no consultants in the Bay Area deeply familiar with the latest, best in class solutions from both the industry stalwarts as well as the upcoming class of next-gen solutions providers.
Nor were there many VARs that had dedicated teams of engineers with decades of expertise supporting complex global IT environments that prioritize security, high-level automation, efficiency, and scalability. In fact, the VAR industry was missing much of the added value, in favor of reselling product at scale.
In 2015, Matthew and Alex decided to launch Bridge IT Consulting to fill that whitespace. The goal of their consultancy was to bring the value back to value added reselling, by creating custom-built, end-to-end integrated solutions, using a variety of both brand-name and next-gen technologies, tailored to a client’s specific needs and long-term goals. The pair quickly hired a team of fellow experts and operators who shared their enthusiasm for problem solving for companies across a variety of industries.
Since its launch, Bridge IT has worked with clients to first understand the problem a client wants to solve for — we like to think of it as our clients’ “Why”! Only then does the team assess the existing IT infrastructure and make recommendations that optimize for success and savings. Bridge’s team of tech experts have deep category expertise with both traditional solutions and emerging technologies, making them the best in the business to create bespoke IT infrastructure that prioritizes a clients’ actual needs across security, networking, architecture design, and much more.
Our Team
Matthew Baggett
CoFounder & CEO
Matthew co-founded Bridge IT in 2015 with Alex Gonikman, with a simple question: how do we help our clients solve for “Why”?
Prior to Bridge IT, Matt was in the technology space for over a decade. He began his career in technology solutions at Dell|EMC. Shortly after, Matt worked at several IT consulting firms providing a wide variety of technologies and solutions before founding his own firm. Matt founded Bridge IT to address what he felt was lacking in the market, a strong team of engineers with a variety of depth and breadth with unmatched customer service, integrity and customer loyalty. Matt received his B.B.A. at California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo.
Alex Gonikman
CoFounder and Technologist
A highly accomplished leader in the IT, Alex was born in the data center with over twenty years of experience in IT and infrastructure. He began his career at Oracle where he left as Principal Systems Architect. After spending a decade at Oracle, Alex went on to hold similar roles and create the infrastructure for NetApp, Lending Club, and Nimble before moving to consulting where he served as the Sr. Director of Engineering and Technical Services. Shortly after moving to consulting, Alex joined forces with Matt Baggett to found Bridge IT Consulting. Alex obtained his B.S. in Computer Science at California State University – East Bay and obtained an innovation and entrepreneurship award from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Alex Ciavarra
Head of Security and Networking
Alex has a decade of experience in the IT industry working in the networking and security fields. After studying physics and mathematics at Old Dominion University, he worked in Bioinformatics research at Eastern Virginia Medical School while doing independent IT consulting. After research, he transitioned to IT consulting full-time and worked with small to large enterprises as well as public institutions and government entities. Alex has worked as a pre-sales and post-sales engineer as well as provided architect-level IT consulting for multiple large consulting firms along with his independent consulting work before joining Bridge IT full-time where he now serves as the lead solutions architect for networking and security solutions.
