Addressing The Network End-To-End Helps MSP Secure SLA
When Sean Furman, president of managed services company S.T.F. Consulting, first walked into the server room of a potential professional services customer a few months ago, he was flabbergasted. The 30-person company, which had two IT people, was sitting on more than 20 servers. "You might as well have put a server on each employee's desk," says Furman. His
managed services company landed the customer by
proposing a solution to their network mess, a situation
Furman says he often sees in small, professional services
offices. "Their in-house IT people were making
the network more complicated than it needed to be.
They were still doing manual, workstation-level upgrades. Everyone had admin
rights. It was just sloppy," he says.
That only makes his managed services
proposal that much easier to
sell. "We come in, completely overhaul
their network, and leave no
rock unturned," says Furman.
While S.T.F. Consulting is small —
three engineers and an office manager
— it has been in the IT business
for nearly 10 years and shifted
over to a managed services model
five years ago. In this case, the customer
landed at the doorstep of
S.T.F. Consulting after a business
associate referred the MSP as a
solution to the customer's soaring operating costs and
lost productivity related to network problems.
Free Assessment, Visual Proposals Help With Sale
Once on the list as a potential IT partner, S.T.F.
Consulting met with the customer, offered its standard
complimentary network assessment, and outlined its
standard methodology — fix the network, then manage
it. Simple as that. "When I told them that I have a customer
with 200 users that doesn't have as many servers
in their network, that got their attention," says Furman.
He says he strives to demystify the IT solutions he proposes
to customers by using diagrams completed on
Visio (a Microsoft Windows program) to show customers
the existing and proposed network configurations.
Then, he walks them through his IT recommendations
before presenting his cost estimate. Furman also
includes cost-benefit analysis tables in his proposals to
show clients what they will save in terms of worker productivity,
licensing, power, etc. "Since that number usually
ends up being more than they would pay us, the
decision to hire us is simple for them," says Furman.
In the case of this professional services customer, the network project work ran $62,000. The hardware portion ($40,000) included three Dell PowerEdge 2900 servers, onto which S.T.F. Consulting virtualized most of the server roles that were housed in the business' 20 existing servers. The additional $22,000 was in consulting and technical costs. "We did three phases: installed new equipment, migrated the information to the new servers, then reimaged all the workstations," explains Furman.
Use MSP Monitoring Tools
To Assist With Network Overhaul
A common hurdle for this MSP is determining what is
working properly and what isn't within a new customer's
network. S.T.F. Consulting uses its remote monitoring
and management tool from Level Platforms to
identify those trouble spots. "When we first seize control
of a network, Level Platforms is my eyes inside the
network," explains Furman. He installs the tool and
then runs the existing network setup against templates
within the Level Platforms tool (templates are used to
achieve standardized configuration of the most-commonly
used devices on a network). In addition, Furman
has found great value in customizing those templates
for each customer's network needs. "We use the templates,
but add check points on the standard templates,
and then it is incredible what you can look at within a
network," says Furman. It took two months for S.T.F.
Consulting to overhaul the customer's network, with the
most difficult work coming as it migrated the customer
from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.
Today, that professional services customer is on the S.T.F. Consulting standard managed services agreement, which totals $4,000/month. (Furman offers only one level of managed services, an all-encompassing agreement that is based on the number of servers and workstations a clients has; he charges $50 per workstation, $300 per server.) Overall, he expects to take what he learned on this project, particularly the customizations he made to the Level Platform templates he uses to evaluate networks, and carry them forward to use with other customers.