Managed Services Benefits:

How Managed Services from BDPNetworks Can Transform Your Organization

We talk a lot about the difference between most IT services and Managed Services.  Managed Services is a fixed-fee arrangement where the provider (us) promises to do everything in our power to keep your IT systems running smoothly.  We deliver an entire stack of services (normally delivered by an internal IT department) for one price.

Managed Services transfers the risk of business IT management to the Managed Service Provider.

The benefits of managed services are almost immediate: companies who have experienced random downtime see it disappear.  Security problems are permanently solved.  The logistics associated with deploying new machines and moving things around as the business needs change are handled.

Traditional IT services throw bodies and hours at the problem, and there’s no incentive for traditional IT shops to permanently solve issues.  Managed Services is the way to permanently solve IT issues and keep IT aligned with changing business requirements.

Pricing Managed Services versus Traditional IT Services

Managed Services can seem costly at first glance. But instead of buying scattered piecemeal labor by the hour, you’re essentially purchasing fractional ownership of an IT department that’s designed specifically to keep your systems running optimally.

It’s like an IT department timeshare.

Clients who are new to Managed Services are sometimes uncomfortable to come on board because of cost (we offer a 2-month “get to know you” period for this reason) – but after a few months they start to understand that things are “different” under our Managed Services plans than they were with a traditional break-fix IT model.

Our incentives are built around these components:

• Minimizing the probability of downtime and other unexpected outages
• Building in systems to shorten the duration of downtime for when a problem does occur
• Guaranteed response times to desktop support requests (and anyone in the organization may contact us directly) – and being able to support anyone, on any device, anywhere
• On-going high-level consulting in the form of quarterly meetings with upper-management to keep IT aligned with business goals.

We use a stack of sophisticated, heavy duty tools along with a lot of our own internal processes to accomplish these goals.  You may not always see us working but you can “feel” it because your systems are up and running.

The Long Term Effect of Managed Services on an Organization

We have worked with many types of organizations, and we find that the longer we have worked with them the better things get internally in the organization as a whole.  It can take up to a year to really make a big impact. Organizations who have been affected by IT problems in the past find that IT issues are no longer “blocking” people’s work.

Managed Services benefits your organization because it stabilizes IT budgets, so there are no unexpected peaks and valleys, and “right-sizes” IT costs for an organization.

After a while, and through strategic meetings with management, we work to put together a long-term plan that helps direct IT resources over a period of months or even years.  This strategic alignment yields impressive results over time, as companies no longer see IT as just a “cost center” but instead see IT as a valuable strategic partner that contributes directly to the bottom line.

Managed Services: The best way to do IT

Managed Services is here to stay, and it is the best way to run IT services in organizations up to around 200 people.  (Larger organizations can still benefit by offloading core infrastructure management to Managed Service providers to free up internal IT resources for strategic work.)

If you have questions about Managed Services, contact us today – we’re here to help!