The Challenges
Are you facing one or more of the following challenges?
- You IT estate is changing daily and is increasingly multi-vendor.
- Even though you are consolidating and virtualising where possible, your server farm continues to sprawl and is becoming more difficult to support.
- Some of your IT is mission critical, some less so, but managing different SLA’s for different units is extremely time consuming.
- It’s is an administrative burden to ensure all your IT is correctly supported; that items taken out of production are removed from your contract and that any new items are added to support.
- You need to ensure your IT is properly supported but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage a host of different contracts from a number of different providers.
The Implications
- You are at very high risk if your mission-critical IT is not be covered my mission critical support contract.
- You may be paying too much for your support; covering every item with the same SLA is usually not necessary but from an administrative point of view may "just be easier" at this point.
- The administration of a multitude of support contracts for a multitude of IT vendors with a multitude of renewal dates deflects you from concentrating on projects that will make a difference to your business.
The Solution
With an ability to offer one support contract, with one number to call, with one anniversary date, Advanced 365’s Managed Maintenance offering covers a number of Tier 1 vendors including HP, IBM, Sun / Oracle, NetApp and Cisco.
Our objective is simple; we aim to be more competitive, more flexible, and more valuable than your current support partner. To achieve this, Advanced 365’s Managed Maintenance offering includes:
- Ability to offer SLA’s from 8x5x365 to 24x7x365 fix, not just response.
- Access to a 24x7x365 Advanced 365-owned Help Desk
- A bespoke contract that can be customer-personalised with your references included
- Ability to add or remove items from the contract, with the contract value being revised accordingly on an ongoing basis
- Customers greatly reduce the number of contracts and points of contact as a result of collating the majority of their IT onto a single contract
- Predictable cost
How it Works
If required, Advanced 365 can audit your estate as part of its Managed Maintenance service, then agree with you the SLA’s for each item that are most relevant for your business. Alternatively, customers can deliver this detail to Advanced 365 so that a quote can be published to you.
- Customers have the option of either paying for an "overall contract covering everything" or "pay a smaller fee with additional call out charges"
- Customers can add or deduct up to 10% to the contract value with no penalty
Advanced 365’s pricing is regularly bench-marked against vendor and competitive offerings
Advanced 365's Technical Assurance Programme (TAP) offers access on a need only basis to the IT expertise that has evolved at Advanced 365 since 1987.
The Service
Hiring in reliable and technically competent expertise at short notice can expose your business to a minefield of problems and is only ever available at a premium. TAP provides a remedy to this situation, by offering access to Advanced 365's comprehensive portfolio of product based skills, delivered against pre-defined service levels at a highly competitive fixed price.
How to use TAP
Advanced 365's Technical Assurance Programme (TAP) is designed to fill the gap in your organisations technical resources.
Design
IT functions evolve, which means that legacy systems have to be removed and existing systems need to be integrated with the new. Identifying the most suitable hardware and solutions can be an expensive decision for organisations. TAP provides access to a range of experienced technology independent consultants able to guide you through the change.
Deployment
From time to time, every organisation's IT department needs to double or treble overnight. It might be to move office, roll out new infrastructure or deploy a wireless LAN. You can call on TAP to provide these resources when you need them most.
Operate
All organisations have a range of mission critical Information Technology functions. Many require a permanent hardware break / fix contract or application SLA. But in some cases this is simply not practical; the IT function may be very reliable making it impossible to justify the in-house resource or the contract break / fix and SLA may simply not be affordable. TAP provides the resource when you need it most. When these IT functions go wrong a business can grind to a halt with costly implications, both in terms of system down-time and the cost and time spent in finding the right resource to get the business up and running again. TAP provides peace of mind through guaranteed access to the technical resource you need to resolve these issues.
Advanced 365's unique Technical Assurance Programme (TAP) effectively increases the size of a client's IT team by up to150 highly experienced and skilled staff. TAP provides cost effective and flexible access to the wide range of technical resources available from Advanced 365, providing our clients with peace of mind from the technical assurance they have at their command.
How does it work?
Under the TAP scheme, a client purchases a number of credits in advance for a 12 month period. When a TAP resource is required, the client places a call to the TAP Service Desk where an experienced client liaison operator will manage, co-ordinate and track the service that Advanced 365 deliver in its entirety. Combined TAP credits are deducted as payment for varying levels of services that are provided. clients are sent a TAP Statement on a monthly basis, which keeps them abreast of their current TAP Credit usage and enables them to budget for the year ahead. There are currently three levels of service available:
Application Development
Members of Advanced 365 in-house development team experienced in a wide range of third party applications, development environments and languages are available to provide development, support and troubleshooting services for our clients.
Technical Consultancy
Technical Consultants skilled in the TAP Product Portfolio are primarily used to develop your systems further and develop your current and future business requirements into tried and tested technical solutions. These individuals also provide the highest level of support and are available for escalation of any technical problems that might occur.
Technical Support
Server Hardware Support engineers, who are also skilled in Operating System Administration, are available under this scheme and can be deployed at very short notice to assist with an urgent or critical need. Alternatively, many of our clients schedule these visits on a weekly basis so that their systems are regularly checked and any outstanding administrative tasks conclusively dealt with.
Telephone Support
TAP clients can place a call with the Service Desk to request information or discuss technical problems or issues. All calls are handled by technical specialists who can draw upon the Advanced 365 Technical Knowledge Database to provide accurate and speedy responses.
How will your business benefit?
TAP can reduce the costs and limit the risks of supporting and managing increasingly complex networks. Additionally, there are a multitude of tangible business advantages to be gained:
- Access to IT Industry experts offering guaranteed response within defined service levels;
- Access to experts when NEEDED;
- Availability of IT skills that augment the limits of your organisation's capability;
- High availability of all skills charged on a per usage basis;
- Free up your valuable resources so that you can focus on core business operations;
- Work with a partner who will grow to understand your business and its development and can transpose evolving business requirements into the latest technological solutions;
- A responsive business partner that will expertly design, develop, deliver and manage a technical solution in its entirety and actively coordinate all the relevant skills;
- Reduces the costs of employing high level support specialists
