Small business thinking of VoIP?

2010-02-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

Many small companies looking to upgrade their phone systems are pushed towards IP systems as a “must have”. Many are also persuaded to go for hosted IP systems. It’s all great until they find their broadband falls over and because the broadband doesn’t have a Service Level Agreement they’re left without phones for 2 days. It’s one thing for “the computers to be down” when a customer calls but customers expect they can always reach you by phone. Ok, so you can start diverting to mobiles but unless you’re a very small business this becomes quite impractical. With the correct advice and solution we think IP systems are a “must have” – it’s just important to make sure there is still coverage via PSTN/ISDN-gateway or that you have a broadband connection with an SLA (at least until the UK has 100Mbps fibre to every building!).
There are many reasons to look at IP but if I had to pick the single best feature of our VoIP solutions it’s the ability to be reachable on my extension number anywhere – office, home, mobile. The office can seamlessly transfer calls or people can call me on my DDI without having to search to find where I am – if I’m online in the remote location the call costs nothing. With presence indicators we really start to see to see the possibilities for clients who cannot all be in the same office (as they’re working all over the world). With enough bandwidth video calling becomes workable and the full unified messaging suite starts to become a reality.

http://www.enlinea.co.uk/
http://www.manageit.com/

What’s in a Managed Service Provider (MSP)?

2010-02-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

For clients that let us take a managed service approach to IT they’d never go back. For clients that still have break/fix IT support it can be hard to see the advantages and there is always a worry it’s going to cost more overall.

So what is all the buzz about having your IT infrastructure looked after by a Managed Service Provider (MSP)? Essentially, it’s about letting a company take control of your IT and letting them manage it in the way they choose to. Of course, the customer still retains overall direction but it’s down to the MSP to use their expertise to support and manage the infrastructure in a way that maximises client satisfaction and productivity.
MSPs rely heavily on pro-active maintenance which has benefits for both MSP and the customer. If we think of it at a simple level, the MSP wants to monitor everything and make sure they know when something is about to cause a problem or is causing a problem – the faster the MSP knows, the faster it gets fixed. The faster it gets fixed, the smaller the issue has become and the cheaper it is to resolve – maybe it saves an on-site visit or saves the helpdesk being flooded with calls about the same issue. The MSPs’ engineers are happy too as their blood pressure has been kept at a reasonable level.
If we look at this from the customer side, their network is being maintained by someone who’s sole goal is to make sure nothing goes wrong with it and has very strong incentives to make sure they keep trying to achieve that goal. This means the customer loses the absolute minimum in staff productivity. In addition, the MSP can keep costs low by applying the same “known” management techniques across a larger customer base. Customer is happy with cost and uptime of their network so recommends the MSP to everyone they know. MSP gets more business ....

I’m simplifying above but overall it highlights some key drivers for the MSP and the key benefits to the customer.

If we flip back to the break/fix model there is little incentive in making sure problems don’t occur – in fact if you’re being charged by the hour then incentive is the opposite. Companies also face a problem with how you bill for all those hundreds of 5-10 minute calls. If nothing ever goes wrong how would the support company make any money and how would it finance the ability to have staff, software, systems, procedures and knowledge to ensure things don’t go wrong…!?

If you’re on a break/fix agreement there might be no monitoring (there is no fund to pay for it), there might be no service level (who’s paying for the engineer sitting waiting to respond to your server failure?) and there is little feedback (unless you pay in one sense or another for the company to do a report).

One of our main assets in helping clients see the value from the MSP approach is reporting. Many clients worry that they’re ending up paying monthly for something and getting nothing – especially when the best job is being done and no major issues arise. The reports let us demonstrate why no major incidents arise – e.g. the antivirus software on all 500 PCs is bang up to date, a critical server process failed at 3am on a Sunday but was back running by 4:05am, 5% of the staff had some minor PC issue which was resolved remotely in minutes letting them get on with their work again etc.
At enlinea all our contracts have a break option so you can change at any time if you don’t think it’s making a difference to your business. So far we haven’t lost a single customer who has opted for the managed service approach.

It’s not been an easy path though and our investment in office infrastructure, management tools and people has been very high. By being in the minority who really use the strategy we hope this investment will work out longer term for our customers and as a result, for ourselves.

http://www.enlinea.co.uk/
http://www.manageit.com/

Enlinea Managed Services Blog

Small business thinking of VoIP?

What’s in a Managed Service Provider (MSP)?