Corporate Technologies’ professional services organization provides a comprehensive range of support services—including contract management, outsource/insource assessment, asset inventory management, and technology trade-off evaluation—geared to optimizing IT assets, while minimizing IT costs.
Contract Management
Before we recommend any modification to service coverage, we develop a blueprint
that will serve to optimize each customer’s coverage needs. We fully
analyze internal and external SLAs. We review both your current support contracts
and data center inventories, then apply our “best-practice” support
rules. For example, we make sure there are no gaps in coverage, no overlap
between service and maintenance contracts, or no discontinued assets still
under coverage. We even document your internal capabilities and resources
to understand costs associated with administrative support. We discuss the
amount of time companies dedicate to tracking IT assets, taking equipment
off contract, moving equipment from one site to another. We do a “gap
analysis” for clients so we reconcile what IT equipment is covered
under contract.
Armed with this comprehensive level of understanding, we then recommend changes in coverage that will result in significant cost savings—ensuring appropriate service levels , consolidating contracts to gain discounts, canceling licenses included in hardware support, or co-terminating contracts to simplify management.
For an international manufacturing company, our “best-practice” support services saved our client over $225,000 and significantly reduced their management time, while gaining compliance with FDA guidelines mandating application support. For a cosmetics manufacturer, our contract management services reduced total support costs10%, by canceling service contracts that were already included as part of the hardware support.
Corporate Technologies also allows clients to manage their own support contracts on an ongoing basis with its Client Portal. Through the Portal, clients can easily streamline support activities—managing costs, avoiding coverage lapses, accessing contract detail from vendors, and requesting updates to support contracts.
Outsource/Insource Assessment
Corporate Technologies’ professional services team provides comprehensive
assessment of outsourcing versus insourcing—we consider factors such
as operating and capital costs, labor costs, and finance options to determine
which approach would be most effective. The scope of our assessments range
from discrete IT assets and functions to complete IT infrastructures. Once
we complete an assessment and select an approach, Corporate Technologies professional
services can architect, integrate, optimize and support the full solution,
serving as our client’s “technology support umbrella” throughout
the process.
For a growing full-service ISP, our assessment showed that insourcing their IT infrastructure would be significantly more effective than outsourcing. We then designed and implanted their entire IT infrastructure from scratch—hardware, software, networks, and power/cooling subsystems and migrated a very large data set to inside staff, project-managing over a dozen vendors. Post-migration, our client achieved full payback on capital costs in the first year, and they expect 50% annual savings on operational costs in the future.
Asset Inventory Management
Corporate Technologies’ professional services team helps clients manage
and optimize their IT asset inventory. Our approach often starts with a physical
inventory on an asset-by-asset basis to capture the full description and precise
location of each asset in each data center, so that support calls are directed
to the correct locations. Next, we typically roll up the assets—with
appropriate contracts—into a master document that gives customers a comprehensive
inventory snapshot in time.
We then create a methodology that will keep asset inventory current as new assets are added—and old assets retired—especially important in dynamic environments that are making frequent modifications. Finally, we give clients a powerful tool to help them manage their own assets—our Client Portal. Through our Portal, our clients can locate assets by part number, serial number, host name and location—even proactively manage assets under lease.
Corporate Technologies helped a manufacturing enterprise optimize its extensive inventory of assets. The client had hundreds of servers, running mission-critical applications, deployed in a widely distributed and highly dynamic computing environment. With no physical inventory of servers, we created one—and we discovered both current assets that were not visible to our client and discontinued servers that were thought to be in use. Our professional services team created a master report that documented the servers and their associated contracts, and we identified hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings in inappropriate service agreements. Finally, we implemented a methodology that automatically tracks new servers when added and eliminates old servers when retired, so inventory will always be current in the future.
Technology Refresh versus Support Trade-Offs
Corporate Technologies’ professional services team helps clients optimize
existing IT assets and support contracts, by making trade-offs between technology
refresh and support to minimize costs while meeting SLAs.
Many times, we encounter these trade-offs as part of a client engagement designed to optimize support contracts. Other times we are asked to take a “holistic” view of a data center. Then we make recommendations that minimize Total Cost of Ownership—by reducing hardware and software costs, increasing administrative productivity, and minimizing license requirements.
Either way, our approach is fundamentally the same. We evaluate each IT asset under consideration, and assess which to replace and which to support. Where support costs are excessive, we refresh the technology with newer, better-performing alternatives—while making sure to not over-provision. Where support costs are reasonable and SLAs are being met, we leave the technology in place and revisit it at a later date.
For one of our clients—a multi-national manufacturing firm—we audited hundreds of servers with more than a dozen support contracts to satisfy internal and external SLAs and federal government regulations. We reduced service agreements by 80%, and we implemented technology refresh on appropriate servers, saving just under a quarter of a million dollars—while fully complying with government guidelines mandating application support.