The CIO for SMB

I sent an email to a prospect today who is considering moving to a Managed Service model from his current “Break/Fix” environment. Read on:

I want to try to articulate the differences between staying in your current “break/fix” model and moving to a proactive managed service like EDDSA. This is not meant to be disparaging toward your current vendor. I know those guys and know they do good work. But, as a two man shop with no software tools, they will not be able to manage your extremely complicated network at your 22+ locations. Your company’s computer needs have simply outgrown a break/fix model.

First, in your current model, you are attempting to “isolate the cause of the problems and what is taking up our time”. You would not be doing that in the EDDSA model. We will take over and manage your network, just as if you hired a CIO and a fulltime IT staff. Imagine if you actually did hire a CIO and gave him a budget to hire an IT staff. Would you, as the Chief Professional Officer, take your time to try to understand the IT problems? Or would you leave that to the CIO and his team? Once you hire us, we become that trusted team. We aren’t going to try to sell you new servers or software or anything that you don’t need. If you need something we will make recommendations (just like a staff member would) and work within your budget constraints and business goals to make your computer network that best it can be.

At a rate of $750/month*  to manage 4 servers, their rate is about 15% higher than ours. If you would like us to just manage the servers our price is $639.84. What monitoring software do they use (we use Kaseya)? How will you be informed when the servers go down? Typically, in a break/fix environment, it is the customer who calls the vendor when the server goes down, which leads to service disruption. With EDDSA, because we are monitoring your servers 24/7, we will know about disruptions in service before you do, especially if it occurs after hours.

It sounds like you also want to get a feel for all of the service issues in your network. That’s why we use ConnectWise. All of your service issues will be managed in our system so that we can spot trends and degradations in performance. Without this tool we would be reinventing the wheel every time a customer called in to the Help Desk. What service desk tool does your current provider use?

I could ask our staff about your Citrix vs. Microsoft question, but I know how they would respond. They would ask:

• Why do they want to switch?
• Do they have the budget?
• What business goals are they trying to achieve?
• What other network purchase need to be made?
• Are they having problems with the Citrix Servers? What kind of problems? Why?

Do you see the difference? When we are managing your network we don’t want you to buy anything you don’t need. We protect our clients from other vendors and help them to get the best prices for the items they do need. We sit in on budget and business meetings (just like a member of the staff) to insure the IT infrastructure will support the business objectives.

I would encourage you to give us a chance. Please call our references and talk to them. Ask them about our service. Ask them about our Help Desk. Then, instead of staying in your current break/fix model for the next month or year, give us a chance for the next month. If we need to modify the contract to suit your needs, so be it. We can work it out. I promise you that.

Sincerely,

Craig

*this is the price quoted by the current vendor

Get yourself off the “break/fix” runaway train. Call EDDSA today.

Related articles

• Five Questions To Ask Your Managed Service Provider (itexpertvoice.com)