It pays to do your homework when it comes to choosing a
partner in any managed services project. As Dom Hall explains,
finding a company whose skills dovetail with what your firm does
will pay dividends long-term.
Over the past 10 years, the IT supplier market has been defined
by one major trend – the scramble for services. As the companies
operating in the 1980s and 1990s realised, the margins they made on
hardware sales were getting smaller and smaller. So the smarter
ones looked to the future and began to build their businesses
around managed services.
The problem your company faces is that, a decade down the line,
so many suppliers made this switch that identifying the real
players with solid managed services offerings, as opposed to those
merely playing catch-up or selling a more basic set of services,
can be a minefield.
Those of you who have properly costed out projects and made the
decision to go down the managed services path are likely to find
the process of selecting a vendor a difficult choice to make. It is
one which will involve long, hard scrutiny of a potential
supplier’s internal resource, market reputation, history and even
balance sheet before you even begin to look at the ins and outs of
the managed services offering itself.
Alain Falys, CEO of global business-to-business electronic
invoice delivery service Open Business Exchange (OBE), made the
decision to outsource the running of his company’s mission critical
processing infrastructure to Computacenter three years ago.
Open Business Exchange bases its operations around an electronic
invoicing service in order to provide streamlining in its invoicing
process and to cut its overheads when dealing with suppliers and
buyers, whatever their size or accounting package.
Falys says OBE looked at a number of suppliers, but made the
choice to begin its external relationship “primarily because of the
[supplier’s] expertise. [It] has pools of experts with up-to-date
skills in the latest technologies and that is very important for
us,” he says.
“We also looked for industry-wide certifications, people,
service level agreements and the ability to respond to crisis.”
Falys adds: “Our electronic invoice delivery network is our core
service and the more critical something is, the more important it
is to have an assigned team of people looking after it.”
Latest technologies
While expertise is clearly central to the managed services
relationship, there are more basic factors you need to bear in mind
during the provider selection process to really get to the heart of
a real offering.
Ian Vickers, founding director of managed services provider
Managed Enterprise Technologies (MET), believes finding out exactly
how much of a provider’s business has historically come from
managed services can provide a good pointer.
While this will give a good indication of the true value a
provider will supply, John Stewart,
CEO of security-focused managed services provider Signify,
advocates even closer scrutiny, including checking customer renewal
records and looking at delivery statistics.
“The best indicator is the vendor’s internal service statistics
produced by their service team, rather than official statistics
that may have been ‘marketised’,” he says.
Quality of service
Managed services is clearly something you need to consider with
your eyes wide open, and the
message from those involved both in provision and on the other side
of the fence is to do as
much work possible to verify the quality of service that you are
likely to receive. Then make sure
your provider of choice is capable of delivering all it claims it
can. _
Top 10 tips for choosing a managed services supplier
1. Ensure your potential supplier understands the
business you are in.
2. Identify how focused the potential supplier is
on your market sector. Are they ‘all things to all men’, or can
they really help add value to your business?
3. Construct a contractual relationship that
shares risk and reward.
4. Enter the relationship with the objective that
this should be a win–win experience for both parties.
5. Look to see if the potential supplier involves
people in the pre-sales process that will be involved in the
ongoing service, ensuring continuity.
6. Ensure that the contract is flexible, thus
enabling you to make a long-term commitment to the
partnership.
7. Build an exit plan for the end of the
contract.
8. Seek evidence that the service provider clearly
understands how it will address the transitional period,
particularly with respect to the transfer of employees.
9. Ensure your staff communicates with the
service provider, with the aim of making the partnership work for
both parties.
10. Don’t outsource a hidden problem.
This article was part of Computer Weekly's managed services
business channel, sponsored by Computacenter.