In a world of sensationalistic click-bait headlines, you may think that I am exaggerating. Take a few minutes to read this and I’ll prove to you that over-promising and under-delivering, in many cases by outright falsehoods, is how the industry runs.
Step One: The Sale. You are a seasoned IT Manager, Director, VP, CIO but the landscape is changing. From hundreds of components comprising Public Cloud, to pressure from C-suite to capitalize on emerging AI technologies, and ever present fear of a security breach, you just cant get to everything. So you open up google, call a few CIO friends, and make a short list of consulting firms.
If you pick a good one, a polished looking ex-athlete type comes in with a geeky looking engineer in tow. You sit for an hour, explaining your strategic objectives, while the sales guy assures you that they know precisely what you need; are you trying to reduce OpEx and looking at pushing some historical data to the Cloud? Surprisingly, he explains that it’s not as cheap or seamless as you’ve read, that you’d have to pay to replicate it across regions, and wouldn’t it be simpler to just expand your local and familiar SAN? Don’t worry, he’ll get you a great deal.
What he’s not telling you is that it’s quarter end. He’s already made his number, but if he sells you a few shelves of storage, on which their margin is about 50 percent, he’s getting that 30 foot boat he’s wanted. Does he know that extending to Azure would have cost you a fraction of buying the storage or that it would be all pay-as-you-go rather than a big check? Almost certainly, but his job isn’t to help you. His job is to make money for the company and himself. Don’t estimate his ability to convince you. I’ve seen sales people make more than most CEOs.
Step Two: Execution. You call your top Engineer and ask him to sit with these guys and review their proposal. The MSP engineer will be one of their top guys; in some cases, he’s their only top guy. This is designed to give the impression that everyone at the MSP is experienced, technical, and trustworthy. The moment you sign the Statement of Work, you get an entirely different team. They’re slower, noticeably less technical, and don’t seem to grasp the nuances of your environment. Concerned, you add yet another meeting to your calendar to make sure these guys don’t miss the deadline you’ve reported to C-suite.
Step Three: The Support. Well, it wasn’t smooth nor fast, but everything is in production. The MSP says they have 24/7 follow the sun support model. Yet, you start to hear grumblings from the troops. The situation really heats up when there is an outage. Your team calls and opens a Sev 1. So far, so good. Someone even calls back and asks a few questions about what’s going on. After a few hours of silence you call back and demand an engineer. Sound familiar so far? The ‘engineer’ starts asking nonsensical questions. You ask for escalation. Finally, at 6am you start considering updating your resume, but someone calls back. The guys seems groggy but competent. Just before 9am you’re back.
What you don’t know is that there is no engineer around after 11pm or later. It’s just going to a call center in Indonesia, where they read from a script. If you’re lucky, there’s a Jr Admin who can do basic troubleshooting, but the real talent is expensive. They miss your support SLA? Big deal, they’ll refund the monthly fee and take you to lunch to smooth things over.
The Kicker: How Sausage is Made. The MSP business has razor thin margins, is highly commoditized and senior talent is nearly impossible to source. The better MSPs have internal training, but in most cases they optimize for cost. That means that the engineer you’re dealing with is the cheapest guy they could find, is probably just out of school, and is just good enough for you not to fire them. The better MSPs also have very detailed ‘paint by numbers’ internal documents, but the people doing the work often don’t understand the mechanisms, which can lead to things like locking out all users because they implemented the ‘standard’ Conditional Access policy over the weekend without excluding the Azure Virtual Desktop, for instance.
But Wait: There’s More. This doesn’t always happen, but we’ve found many clients where the incumbent MSP simply neglected to perform maintenance: missing patches, broken backups, errors in BCDR systems, to name a few. MSP employe utilization is a factor of profitability, so they are grossly oversubscribed and burned out. Most MSPs don’t have vision to design automated process with checks and balances, so they just trust that the engineer assigned to your account will do his job; but as we know, to err is human.
The Pitch: Our goal is to totally reinvent the MSP model. We’re small in headcount, but hire only by word of mouth, and only the absolute best. The engineer that you meet is the same engineer that will deploy, is the same engineer who supports you. In most cases, you’ll have his mobile number. We monitor, automate, and BCDR until we reach perfection.
Our revenue model is designing for simplicity and stability; that way you never have to call – a win/win. If you do, in virtually all cases you’ll get the person who built the solution, as well as someone from the C suite on the bridge, day or night.
We have no sales staff, no quotas, no marketing. These posts and reputation is how we’ve grown. Not a single client has left us in the last five years and all are happy to provide a reference.
Want a second opinion on your Cloud? Give us a call.
