nscglobal - News

Optimising Your Support

August 7th, 2008

For any organisation keen to reign in operating costs, IT support is a thorny issue. The criticality of network infrastructure means that support will often take top priority in terms of budgets and face the most scrutiny in the event of any issues which effect core business processes.

However, many large organisations are starting to seriously revaluate direct support contracts with manufactures in a bid to achieve better value for money and improvements in service.

“Most of the Large manufacturers in the networking, telecoms and communication space have tended to outsource site engineers and call centres support to third parties to reduce costs,” comments Neil Newing, Business Development Manager for Services at nscglobal, “…because of these contracts and the sheer size of many of these companies, support has become very inflexible and often quite expensive.”

Supporting issues
Newing notes that other common complaints include very strict inflexible requirements when submitting support requests, and a lack of proper service level agreements, “Most vendors run operational level agreements, which if they fail to meet – all they do is apologise and promise to do better next time” he explains, “There is no penalty for failure to deliver other than a degradation in customer confidence. When a customer needs support it’s because all internal avenues have been exhausted. This is a time when a partner should be going the extra mile.”

The other major problem area is within mixed vendor environments as Newing explains, “Using a single supplier for all your network equipment could theoretically reduce support costs but in reality, very few companies take this route.”

“From a support standpoint, trying to pin down a problem where the cause could lie within equipment from two or three vendors can be tricky – especially as each will have limited understanding of a rival’s products, or worse, refuse to interact with a support department from a rival manufacturer.”

A new approach
It is for many of these reasons top tier partners such an nscglobal have pioneered new partner led support programmes. “Partner support programmes have three main differentiators,” comments Newing, “They are much more flexible, are accountable through true SLA’s and in like-for-like comparison are much more cost effective.”

Newing estimates that an nscglobal partner support service is normally around 30% less expensive than a manufacturer support contract on a like for like basis. “The reason is that partner support offerings are very customer focused,” explains Newing, “We can tailor individual response times and actions based on equipment, locations, time of day – in fact the client can customise almost every facet of the deal to get a mix of cost and support to suit the business.”

Better service
With top level accreditation across Cisco, F5, Juniper and other top tier equipment manufacturers, “We are able to offer a support services that covers interconnected infrastructure to the highest standards,” explains Newing, “nscglobal acts as the single point of contact and delivers support staff onsite while liaising with manufacturers to resolve any issue. Ultimately, we carry the can if things are not handled properly.”

Partner led support programmes are growing in popularity, “A one hat fits all type service doesn’t meet the needs of many of our clients” comments Newing, “Over the next few years, we suspect that most large enterprise customers will switch to partner or hybrid support contracts, to both improve service and reduce costs.”

nscglobal acquires PING, a US network integrator

July, 5th 2010

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