In case we forget
You’ll have noticed that we discuss IT support a lot in our blogs. This is not the start of ensuring that our customers’ systems are well maintained and reliable as they can be. The start is the design of the IT solution designed to meet a specific business objective.
When we are tasked by a customer to specify and install an IT system for their business, the first place we start is with the business itself.
There is such a huge variety of equipment and software out there that it can be really difficult for the non expert to specify the right IT solution and all too easy for the poorly qualified or unscrupulous IT vendor to specify something that suits their needs without suiting yours.
Our approach is to find out about you and your business to define what kind of systems, software and implementation services are needed to deliver an effective, long lasting IT solution that really fits your business needs now and for the useful life of the solution (3 to 5 years normally).
This does not always make us the cheapest up front, but what our customers do find is that over the life of the solution, OCD offer a far better ROI as the real cost of owning an OCD IT solution is lower.
So if you need an effective, business focused IT solution in Glasgow, Scotland or further afield, you know where we are and how we work.
Flattery – It Feels Kind Of Good
We recently installed an online chat facility on our website so that potential customers and customers can speak to us directly if they have any questions. It works well and we are very pleased with the results so far.
But that isn’t really the point of this article. We also found that one of our competitors was spending quite a lot of time on our site. I won’t name them because they would probably be really embarrassed, but in many ways it is very flattering that a close competitor is looking at as in such microscopic detail.
IT support in Glasgow is a very defined market and there are quite a lot of companies offering support of all kinds, but we are really the only one that has really defined and stuck to an entirely proactive support model because it is the one that our customers and our target market need and demand. This does not mean we fit everyone’s need.
The other Glasgow IT Support company I mentioned, well they do traditional IT support and only respond when something is broken, rather than doing what we do, which is make sure it doesn’t break in the first place. So we have been left with a dilemma. Has this competitor realised that more and more organisations in Glasgow now want proactive IT support, as opposed to the reactive old style maintenance that most Glasgow IT Support companies provide? Or are they just fishing around to see what their competitors are doing.
As always we wish them well, but really hope they are just fishing around.
Proactive makes sense in a competitive market
We heard this morning that Adventi have gone. This is clearly a blow both for the industry and especially for Adventi’s customers. We would really like to wish all the staff at Adventi the best. For the company’s customers, just as we did very successfully at the beginning of the year when RFL Group also went down, we will be happy to provide short term support in a variety of ways while you work out what you are going to do and who is best suited for your long term IT needs.
On a more positive note we’ve noticed a lot of activity in the Glasgow IT support market, with more and more companies looking for a something a that works a bit more in line with their business needs. In most cases we are being told that the traditional support models, where it gets fixed only after its broken, is costing companies too much in lost productivity and revenue, especially when they are under constant pressure from their customers to deliver better service. One new customer told us that while an hour with a server down is just about bearable, the knock on effect on their ability to deliver service to their customers equates to about a working day. In a highly competitive, aggressive market our customer cannot afford that luxury.
We’ve always known that proactive IT support is the right way to maintain something, but we had not worked through just how much the knock on effect of just an hour’s downtime is on a business. It’s also really refreshing to meet a company that really understands the value of its IT to the business. It’s even nicer to be the Glasgow IT support company they chose because, in their considered and we think expert opinion, we deliver the best IT support for their needs.
Adventi IT Support – What does the future hold?
More bad news this week for jobs in Scotland which is disappointing to say the least.
One of the firms making the news was the IT support company Adventi (made up of Adventi, Scotsys and Integral Arm) who are based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Bellshill which went in to administration on Thursday.
Whilst the company is still trading as they look for a buyer, they have cut staff numbers by 50% from 44 to 22.
The administrators are very optimistic on finding a buyer and hopefully they can secure this very soon to enable the business to take care of its IT support commitments.
It’s crucial that as many companies as possible continue to trade to protect their Clients and to provide quality competition in the Scottish marketplace which in reality, is fairly small in real terms.
There are many comments in the news that it was the VAT office inflexibility which precipitated the administration, however, the £500k loss a year or two earlier may also have been a particularly significant factor.
There are many IT companies in Scotland and England looking to take advantage of the situation in various ways, however, I personally hope Adventi can continue in whatever form and provide uninterrupted service to their Clients.
We wish the team at Adventi all the best in the coming days and months (particularly those who are looking for new jobs ).
Links to various news articles:
http://business.scotsman.com/industry/Adventi-goes-into-administration.6233993.jp
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7100715.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8626033.stm
National Server Downtime Day
Have you heard about the new public holiday being enjoyed by office workers all around the UK?
It’s called National Server Downtime Day. At least that’s what we’ve christened it here at OCD after our most recent research showed that – on average – 7.5 hours of work each year per employee are lost to every server outage.
That’s one full day of productivity per server per annum, presumably adding up to billions of pounds in lost revenue, and that’s just the average. The figures vary widely. We drew on a range of statistics, from the UK government and industry surveys to anecdotes from new customers coming to OCD dissatisfied with the service they’d received elsewhere.
We discovered one instance where 87 hours of work a year was lost to each server. On the flip side, that dropped to just over two hours for Windows 2008 servers in a large data centre. Recent independent research by operations management firm Avocent found that a third of companies had lost mission-critical data due to unplanned downtime and 43% reported, on average, up to five unplanned downtime events each month.
OCD customers face no such frustrating and unnecessary disruptions to their time and profitability. We are very proud to say that our clients experience unplanned outages of less than three hours per year – two hours and 42 minutes to be precise. That’s a performance rate of 99.99%, a phenomenal achievement given that most of the companies don’t have an IT specialist onsite.
OCD customers know that the service we provide will ultimately save or even make them money. As one put it recently, “We might as well have given the staff an extra holiday for the time we used to lose until OCD took over our support.” That customer now gets an extra day and a half’s productivity per server per year.
So how do we do it? Put simply, by learning about how your business works, by providing a bespoke IT system to meet those requirements and by adopting a proactive approach.
Our support and maintenance schedules always include:
- Scheduled and planned visits by our Microsoft server experts who carry out a series of checks and maintenance routines to ensure that the server is working to specified tolerances.
- Constant monitoring of servers using a wide variety of tolerances and thresholds so that if one of those is breached, a loud alarm sounds in our technical offices and we react instantly to bring server performance back to normal, which in most cases can be carried out remotely.
- Keeping servers updated with relevant software patches. OCD tests them beforehand to avoid risk to server performance. This is something that very few other IT support companies do and it is often untested patches and updates that play havoc with server reliability.
OCD has been looking after the IT systems of legal practice David Devine & Company based in Glasgow since 2007. As David points out in this newsletter’s case study: “I’m pretty cynical about the promises made by technology companies, but OCD has delivered everything the way it said it would. In three years we haven’t had any unscheduled outages: I think that says everything anyone needs to know about OCD”.
And we agree. So let’s hear it for National Server Downtime Day – one public holiday that OCD customers won’t be taking.
Until next time,
Kevin