A Managed Service Provider, or IT Service Provider, can be shrouded in mystery, inside baseball talk, and stacks of incident reports. That can leave you wondering: what exactly is it that you do for me?
Importance of Vendor Management
One thing that comes standard with Limetree Lab’s services is the management of key services from your vendors. This includes voice and internet services, hardware and software providers, or just about anything that ties into your IT infrastructure. This is often an overlooked component that costs clients valuable dollars when discussing IT budgets.
It is typical when signing up for internet and/or voice services that you get tied into some sort of contract. 1-year, 2-year, 3-year, etc. Typically, the longer the contract, the higher savings you can get when discussing these options at signing. But what happens after committing?
It is not uncommon for contracts to auto-renew into a 1-year contract at their time of expiration. This locks the customer into the same pricing as before for another year. This comes without any notification to help remind the customer it may be time to shop around for better pricing. Here’s where we step in.
Proven Cost Savings
The conversation usually starts with something like this…
When was the last time you evaluated your internet and/or voice provider?
Are you using cloud services that could benefit from higher bandwidth or failover internet services to help ensure your files are accessible in a timely manner—even during a possible internet outage?
Are you missing key features that help your staff increase efficiency or the ability to work remotely?
Most of the time, we find the answer to be “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” However, until we start digging into their current contracts we find that they are leaving a lot on the table for the price they are paying.
Here are two examples from Limetree clients:
Example #1
During the initial time of onboarding, we found that one specific client generated all of their revenue by streaming live auction over the web. They have had an ongoing history of poor video quality when attempting to broadcast their stream. Performing basic company operations such as email, file sharing, etc. were also affected.
When reviewing their provider’s contracts, we noticed this customer was paying far too much for the internet connectivity they had. The first step into our solution was to make this freeway bigger. We were able to contact the current provider and discuss and a bandwidth rate increase of nearly 6x their current speed for no additional charge to their current bill.
This, along with some network changes to help segregate network traffic, was able to ensure the customer could provide an uninterrupted stream of their web auction while taking in no additional costs to the business.
Example #2
This example dives a little deeper. This client has multiple locations with a somewhat modern phone system. While the idea of a good solution was there, the execution did not fall together as seamless as one would hope—incurring expensive internet and voice service bills to piece together.
Dedicated VPN between sites from the vendor for the two phone systems to talk to each other, expensive fiber installs with low bandwidth allocation, on-prem hardware that lacked key features, and scheduled updates to remain up-to-date. All of which seemed like a lot for a 20-person law firm.
After reviewing their highly complicated bill and reaching out to new vendors, we were able to put together a new complete solution for both locations’ connectivity and phones. A package that would save the client nearly $600/mo. Not only would this cut their monthly bill by 40%, but it would also increase bandwidth speeds by 10 fold, remove the need for expensive on-prem hardware to support an aging phone system, and also give the office the key features they need to work remotely or travel between offices seamlessly.
Expect More From Your Managed Service Provider
Cases like this should remind any business out there to have these Vendor Management discussions with their current IT service provider. Expect more and don’t be afraid to bring up these topics.
