Why you need managed services in your life…

Managed services are most definitely the future, but as with so many (relatively) new concepts, it can take a while for people to catch up. Many people are resistant to change and lots of organisations believe that keeping everything ‘in-house’ is safer, cheaper and more productive. But the reality tells a very different story…

What are ‘managed services and how can they help your business?

Managed services are comprehensive, end-to-end remote support administration for your content management system. Managed services offer a single point of contact for all issues regarding the platform, administration and/or the end user interface.

Support, monitoring, reporting and administration, are the key components to any complete managed services offering, which need to be delivered by experienced, certified and highly skilled engineers.

Managed services aren’t meant to replace existing staff members but rather compliment them. For example, a database administrator won’t necessarily know about content management but will know all about databases. So, they can work closely with the managed services provider to ensure any associated workflows, captures or transforms are operating as they should, in order to meet availability and business requirements.

Using managed services can improve customer services allowing experts in their area to be available to address the needs of the company. With access to dedicated skills and more resources, managed services provide an organisation with all the capabilities that are needed.

Managed service providers will have the knowledge and expertise to deal with most challenges, having worked in other organisations and overcome a variety of issues and most importantly, managed services can result in lower costs as the provider should be able to find the appropriate amount of staffing, the correct size of infrastructure and will know exactly what is needed to meet and exceed any requirements.

What are the challenges and what are the results?

The figures speak for themselves. The International Data Corporation (IDC) polled several hundred organisations looking for the key business challenges these companies faced.

While each company had different priorities, almost all of them stated one common challenge: the most valuable and knowledge technical people are too wrapped up in administering systems and processes. These companies expressed a need to free up these highly skilled (and typically expensive!) resources to focus on more strategic corporate initiatives.

Another major challenge these organisations faced is how to manage a rapidly growing infrastructure whilst reducing their associated costs.

Organisations which used a managed services provider experienced much higher quality IT services with only on average 1.5 serious incidents per year, compared with companies which managed their systems in-house which typically experienced 10 to 12 serious incidents each year.

Unplanned downtime was costing these organisations an average of $50k per hundred users annually in user productivity. If you are a large company with thousands of users, unplanned downtime is extremely costly on your user productivity.

How can enChoice help?

EnChoice has been providing a help desk service for enterprise content management (ECM) systems including IBM Content Manager OnDemand (CMOD), which has been operational for more than 25 years and with over 1,200 customers, we have been delivering managed services to more than 800 of these customers.

We have adopted a philosophy of hiring highly experienced and skilled people. Our average experience base is over 15 years and we have made significant investment in our entire infrastructure for service management and we are now ITIL compliant, which is the industry standard.

We pride ourselves on being platform agnostic, so if you are looking to access essential skills, improve customer service, mitigate new technology risks and lower costs associated with your content management system, get in touch with enChoice for more information on managed services.