Installation Review: Customer Service Keystone To Converting Existing Customers To Managed Services

By Gennifer Biggs, Business Solutions magazine.

This MSP plans to upgrade 50% of its current clients to managed services in 2011

The ability to move existing customers to a managed services model is a hurdle every VAR faces as it adjusts its business to a recurring revenue model. For CalTech, an MSP (managed services provider) in Texas, the rollover of existing customers is ongoing. In some cases, it is the trust from a long-term, reactive IT support relationship that helps CalTech more easily sell its managed services program to a customer. For example, the MSP recently addressed that very issue with an independent insurance brokerage facing a serious IT decision. The agency had about 30 devices, including workstations, VMWare ESX servers hosting Windows servers, routers, and APC UPSs. When the internal IT manager for that agency decided to retire, the insurance company faced a choice — hire a new IT staffer or consider a managed services relationship with CalTech. “We had done project work with the customer and had a block hours service agreement with them, but they wanted to see the options,” says Pat Moore, who spearheads the managed services initiative at CalTech as director of its NOC (network operations center).

Before making its pitch, CalTech validated that the insurance brokerage was a good managed services fit, in part by doing a manual check of the existing network. Then, it walked the business through the pros and cons of each scenario, from hiring to fully outsourced IT provided by CalTech.

Once the agreement was in place, CalTech deployed the N-able N-Central Remote Monitoring and Management platform to offer full monitoring of the customer’s network. Installation began by adding a software probe to a single server inside the customer’s network. That probe performs network discovery with the goal of locating and identifying each device on the customer’s network. Once discovery is complete, an agent is pushed to each server and workstation, which collects device data and determines its availability. Then, SNMP (simple network management protocol) monitoring is put into place for the servers and UPS devices.

Since the deployment last July, the customer has suffered no downtime, plus it gets quarterly reports showing network stats, tickets opened, and issues resolved.

While insurance companies are not CalTech’s largest vertical — that’s banking — Moore expects the success with this insurance brokerage will help them roll other insurance customers to managed services agreements.