UK Connect offers engineers as a service

The channel loves its acronyms, especially when it comes to managed services, and a fresh offering now adds ‘engineers as a service’ (EaaS) to the list.

The idea for EaaS has come from UK Connect, which is aiming the scheme squarely at managed service providers (MSPs) and channel partners that struggle with in-house expertise. The credit-based and on-demand offering aims to provide partners with field engineers that can help customers with wireless access and connectivity issues. MSPs can buy credit and then send out senior field engineers to customers across the UK without the challenges of contracts and concerns around personnel vetting.

UK Connect is providing access to engineers with at least five years’ experience that can be despatched to anywhere in the UK, with a digital completion report delivered once the job has been completed.

“Most MSPs look at their field engineering costs and see one number: the engineer’s salary. But that number is only the beginning. By the time you add employer’s National Insurance, pension contributions, van lease, fuel, insurance, tools, PPE, training and the management overhead of scheduling and dispatching, the true cost of a single in-house field engineer is typically 35-45% higher than their base salary,” said Sara Rose, channel and partner manager at UK Connect Professional Services.

“Our model removes virtually all these costs from your balance sheet. You pay per job, with credits that scale up and down with your workload. No vehicles, no employer’s NI, no holiday cover headaches. Just a vetted, senior engineer on-site when and where you need them,” she added.

The UK Connect scheme has also been designed to remove some of the headaches that surround coordinating engineering teams and maximising their performance when they are out on jobs that typically last more than two hours at a time.

As well as costs, engineers represent the company being a public face of a brand that turns up and physically strolls around a customer’s facility, so have a reputational element to their role.  

UK Connect Professional Services has already been working with several MSPs and IT consultancies across the UK, completing more than 3,000 jobs a year, and is expecting the EaaS offering will increase that number.

UK Connect shared a case study detailing the experiences of Scottish mobile connectivity specialist Signal Solutions, which needed an engineer to solve Wi-Fi deployment issues for a customer.

Mark Rose, director of Signal Solutions, said it used the engineer services to solve a challenge: “When performance issues arose at a customer site in Scotland, we needed fast, dependable on-site support to protect both the installation and the client relationship.

“UK Connect deployed a competent engineer quickly, carried out a thorough assessment, and delivered clear, practical recommendations,” he added. “Their professionalism and speed allowed us to resolve the issue efficiently while maintaining full confidence in the quality of service delivered under our brand.” 

There have been several initiatives across the channel, largely led by vendors, to bring engineers and technical staff together to share best practice and increase support networks across the industry.