Steven Lafortune
Patrice Gagnon didn’t discover Devolutions at Valmetal — he brought it with him. And as the team took shape around him, the tools evolved right along with it, one step at a time.
RDM: the tool he carried from job to job
Valmetal is a Quebec-based company headquartered in Saint-Germain-de-Grantham, in the Centre-du-Québec region. They manufacture agricultural equipment: feed mixers, barn-cleaning robots, manure spreaders. The company operates two offices in Quebec, a subsidiary near Quebec City, two facilities in the United States, and a division in California. At peak periods, headcount exceeds 500 people. The IT team: three people.
Patrice Gagnon is the systems administrator. He joined Valmetal in November 2019, and he didn’t arrive empty-handed. Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager had been part of his toolkit for roughly 15 years — first adopted at a previous employer, then fully integrated at the next when the number of servers to manage shot up, and carried into every role since.
The reason is straightforward: on any given day, Patrice might have updates running on one server, a maintenance task on another, and active work on a third — all at the same time. Devolutions RDM keeps everything organized in tabs, accessible without juggling windows. During a major ERP deployment, that project alone required five virtual machines running in parallel. Without that structure, things get chaotic fast.
“I don’t understand how people manage servers without something like Remote Desktop Manager. The efficiency gain is obvious. It doesn’t take long to see it.”
Also read: Ready to move from solo to team? Here’s how RDM makes that transition seamless.
Team growth: when RDM becomes the collective brain
When Patrice started at Valmetal, he was the entire IT department. He knew every server on the network by name, because he’d built most of them himself. That works fine when you’re the only one navigating the environment.
“When I joined Valmetal, Remote Desktop Manager came with me.”
— Patrice Gagnon, Systems Administrator, Valmetal
Then the team grew. A level 2–3 technician joined six weeks ago. And what Patrice carries in his head doesn’t transfer automatically.
That’s where Devolutions RDM proves its value beyond remote connections. Every server is organized, tagged, and annotated. The new technician can find what he needs, understand what he’s looking at, and get up to speed without Patrice having to explain everything. “Everything is in one place — the notes, the structure, the context. For onboarding, that makes a huge difference.”
Also read: RDM stores far more than connections — here’s everything you can centralize to make your environment readable by anyone on the team.
It also means knowledge doesn’t walk out the door when people leave. That’s not nothing for a team of three.
Hub Business: the right tool at the right time
For a long time, KeePass worked perfectly well for password management. When Patrice was managing IT on his own, a local database was enough.
But his needs changed as the team started to grow. The database had to go on the network so others could access it — and if the network went down, the passwords went down with it. Working remotely during an incident meant keeping a local copy on his machine and juggling between the two.
“I needed an offline mode, and I needed a cloud copy. If the network crashes, I still need to be able to get to my passwords.”
Devolutions Hub Business checked every box. And since Patrice was already using Devolutions RDM, moving to Hub Business felt like a natural extension — not a new tool to learn, just more of the same ecosystem.
That decision quickly proved its worth. One evening, a firewall firmware update stalled halfway through. Device frozen, no signal, completely locked — and Patrice was working remotely. “In a situation like that, you need to get to your passwords. I pulled them up on my phone.” Hub Business’s offline cache gave him access with no active network connection.
Also read: Looking for a password manager that works for your whole team — not just you? Here’s what Hub Business brings to the table.
He also uses the browser extension daily, to the point where it’s almost automatic. “Everything fills in by itself. There’s no going back.”
A product that evolves faster than you’d expect
At one point, Patrice wanted a small practical improvement in Hub Business: generate a password directly from a saved policy, right where he was working, without having to open the full generator each time. Two clicks instead of five steps. A minor detail on its own — but when you’re provisioning credentials for ten or twelve users, the time loss adds up.
He sent a screenshot, explained the use case, and that was it. Three weeks later, the feature was deployed.
“I was probably not the only one asking for that. But it proves they’re listening — and you can see it in the product.”
What’s next: Devolutions PAM when the organization is ready
Patrice is direct about Valmetal’s security maturity: Devolutions PAM isn’t on the roadmap yet — the organization needs to get there first. But he’s not worried about the tools. Every time Valmetal has grown, the Devolutions suite was already in place to support the next step. Devolutions PAM will be no different.
And that trust in the tools, Patrice extends to the company itself. “The product works, the price is fair, the support is solid. It’s a Quebec company. We should support it.”
Conclusion: a suite that grows with you
Solo systems administrator, then a team of three. Local password file, then cloud credentials with offline access. One person who knows everything, then a documented environment anyone on the team can navigate.
None of those transitions required switching tools. That’s precisely the point. Devolutions didn’t just work for Patrice when he was on his own — the suite evolved with Valmetal as the team, the sites, and the complexity grew around it.
At some point, you stop thinking about the tools. You open them and get to work.
That’s where the real value lies.
