When partnering with an ISO (independent service organization) for IT and data center needs, business owners have a lot to consider. They don’t want to rely on an organization that only provides the best service to its largest clients, or even at the best price. Nor do they want to be sold equipment or services they don’t need. And how can they be sure that the ISO can properly handle their hardware and specific business requirements?
“It goes back to being honest with the customer and providing the flexibility to put together the best service package for them based on what their needs are,” says Ed Kenty, president and CEO of Park Place International.
Smart Business learned more from Kenty about what businesses should expect from an ISO and the importance of your provider’s credibility.
What are the IT challenges that businesses struggle with the most?
If you’re in a data center environment and you’re running multiple platforms and applications, it gets a little contentious when you’re dealing with multiple vendors. Customers really like being able to pass that off to a third party who can just manage all those vendors on their behalf. The thing customers like most about working with an ISO is they get that single point of contact, or ‘one throat to choke.’ Companies may have multiple contracts in some cases with multiple billing frequencies and need multiple people to administer their IT. With one vendor providing all of those services, you get one bill monthly, quarterly or annually and you get one place to call when you have a problem. That, more than anything, solves a lot of the problems for a business’s IT community.
What kind of service should companies expect from their provider?
For most OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) or large service providers, the primary focus is selling new hardware. They don’t provide advice or consultation on what kind of capacity a company has within its data center. Companies are then constantly pushed to refresh their hardware even when it’s not necessarily required. Other than the convenience of keeping hardware under an OEM warranty, there’s nothing compelling that would require companies to do that.
ISOs are hardware agnostic and don’t push a hardware solution. Often, an ISO will encourage you to stay in your existing platform, while upgrading your disk and your CPS speed and giving you more memory. An ISO provides services such as storage assessments, storage network, and tuning and monitoring. They can see if a storage device is overtaxed and reroute some data to another storage device. There are ways to meet companies’ needs without throwing new hardware in to solve every problem.
Why are these types of service-related issues a problem for many companies?
If companies have to do everything we’ve mentioned themselves, it ties up resources that they quite frankly don’t have. Every IT community out there has been overtaxed and overburdened or has reduced its head count. They need a partner that can come in and help them navigate their way through the technology changes. Being their primary service provider, an ISO is basically augmenting their IT staff.
How does a third-party provider’s credibility factor into its capacity to deliver reliable service to clients?
The whole question of whether or not a third party has the capability to provide support has really been neutralized by the OEMs themselves. Because if you look at the major platform OEMs — Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and others — they use ISO subcontractors for most of their service agreements. They don’t have large IT service organizations running around the country solving customer problems any longer. The days of proprietary hardware and software and only having certified OEM technicians working on the hardware are long gone. They don’t deliver service with their own direct-badged employees any longer, which neutralizes the perception that third parties can’t handle problems as efficiently as the OEMs can.
Still, when working with an ISO, you have to ask for strong reference accounts in your business’s territories. Companies should ask, ‘Who in my geography are you supporting on this equipment?’ An ISO can’t tell potential clients that it can do something without providing them evidence and references.
How can companies ensure their provider is meeting their business needs?
Everything is measured based on the SLA (service-level agreement), so if the client signs a contract with an ISO and it’s for seven-by-24 support, four-hour response (7x24x4), then that’s what the client should expect to get. When entering into an agreement, the expectations should be very clear. And if the provider fails to meet the SLA requirements, then it’s just going to lose the customer.
So it’s not a question of expectations. It’s based on what the customer really needs. He may think he needs the highest level of support on a device, but he may actually only need next-business day support. He may have a different set of needs depending on the devices the company is running, and an ISO shouldn’t try to oversell products or services. A good ISO will recommend the right solution based on understanding the IT environment. It’s about being flexible to work with a client or a prospect to really define what they need, versus what we’d like them to pay for.
