Managed Services is an IT term that crops-up more and more often these days. In a lot of cases, this is a term that is contrasted with the more generic term Support.
Unfortunately there is very little explanation clearly differentiating the two areas. At CheckPoint we offer both; Managed Services and Support. I think it is necessary to discuss the differences and let clients decide for themselves which approach is best for them.
Vendor operated IT support was traditionally a break-fix operation. Smaller companies, trying to avoid major investments in IT operations would simply purchase some help. This help was almost always reactionary in nature. A client would open a ticket or make a phone call and a technician would respond to the issue. If the client was lucky, the issue would be resolved quickly and the service restored. The cost to the organization was lower, in terms of dollars, than having an IT staff with their accompanying overhead. The primary issue with this approach is that is very reactive in nature. If things were happening in a system, or to users, and no one was reporting it, then nothing would be repaired. Performance and efficiency hours would be lost, backups and other items might be missed, and a potential world of issues could build up for the organization. Providers of these IT support services could automate some things and do periodic health checks, but the cost of these increase the break-fix model and could be just as spotty as the ‘call-in-a-problem’ model.
Overtime the larger Fortune 500 companies worked with vendors of IT services to create a more flexible and proactive design. This model is driven by pre-emptive, 24x7 monitoring of systems with an eye toward catching small issues before they become large ones. In an ideal world, these issues are caught, triaged and resolved before an end-user is ever aware. So Managed Services offers a difference in the collective thinking (from an IT vendors perspective) and in the service delivered.
The focus of Managed Services should be:
- 24 Hour Monitoring
- General System Management and Maintenance
- Problem Resolution
With the above values and ordering in place, the focus becomes less on break-fix and more on interception. This focus can happen at a lot of levels within the EPM suite. A company may only want Managed Services for the IT side of the house. In that scenario they would expect expertise in the runtime of the EPM services, assistance with Oracle’s WebLogic components, and perhaps even Microsoft SQL or Oracle DB assistance. At the opposite end of the model, a fully Managed Services stack would address all aspects of the EPM suite. In this model a vendor becomes the EPM expertise for a company and is responsible for everything in EPM from moving data into the suite, to writing and managing the forms and rules around that data, to keeping users connected and resolving individual EPM issues.
What does it come down to?
With all of that said, why would a company think about utilizing Managed Services? Ultimately it all comes down to cost and resourcing. Managing an IT staff to support EPM is challenging. For starters it is more of a job than many people think or expect. In addition to that, there is the perpetual challenge of finding and keeping a trained and qualified resource. Of course, the biggest challenge may be that all of the resourcing challenges take clients away from their core business and makes them focus hours and cycles on system maintenance and support. This prevents staff from focusing on new strategic initiatives. Having to focus on technology and not on business can lead to very dramatic losses.
For many companies, the simpler choice is to turn to someone with specialization in EPM support. The benefits of such a turn include:
- Increased operating efficiency
- Reduced operating costs
- Minimized downtime
- Peace of mind
If your current support model is limited to fixing things after they have already broken consider checking in with CheckPoint for a better solution.
