What Value Do Managed Services Offer? Finally, Procurement

The information technology solutions that are out there for businesses to utilize are constantly improving. While these improvements are beneficial to your operational abilities, you do need to make sure you are staying up to date. This is where a managed service provider can help. Here, in the final part of our series exploring the value of managed services, we’re considering procurement assistance.

Why is IT Procurement Important?

In a nutshell, the most effective way to get value out of your technology is to ensure that each piece serves a purpose, as well as plays nicely with the rest of your infrastructure and solution set. To do so, it may help to examine what solutions effectively any modern business would likely need.

Workstations and Other Resources

In order to properly accomplish their tasks, any employee is going to need the right tools. In your case, that means that they will need workstations and/or the other technology that is most appropriate for their responsibilities - not just whatever you could get the best bargain on.

Let’s imagine that you did settle for what offered you the “best,” lowest price, without considering the value that you’d receive. Chances are good that whatever system you purchased, wouldn’t be able to effectively serve the needs of everyone in your organization… and that’s assuming that you didn’t just get a good “deal” because there is something wrong with these systems.

In this case, you’d have to pay more anyway to have someone fix your workstations, if not purchase more that do suit your needs. A managed service provider, on the other hand, would be cognizant of your business’ needs, leveraging their connections with vendors to get you the most value they could for your money.

Servers and Networking

Once your employees have the tools that they will be working with directly, you will need to have an IT infrastructure in place that allows them to collaborate appropriately. Furthermore, this infrastructure should have the capability to expand to match any growth that your business experiences.

While this all sounds fairly straightforward, it is actually a fairly difficult process - meaning that it should only be tackled by someone who understands how these solutions communicate with one another. Otherwise, there are likely going to be issues and potentially, downtime. If a managed service provider were to assist you, however, your chances of downtime would be greatly diminished. By offering both their professional advice and assistance in actually implementing your solutions, a provider enables your business to adopt these solutions much more efficiently.

Software as a Service

Once you have the technology you need and the infrastructure to support it, you’re going to need the software solutions that your industry demands to properly utilize it all. Now, not to make assumptions about you, but it isn’t uncommon for business decision makers to leverage torrents and pirated copies of the solutions they need in order to save a few bucks. 

These decision makers are making a bad decision by doing so, as it opens up your company to legal issues, unwanted attention from law enforcement, and diminished respect from the public.

A managed service provider can give you a much better option than illegal downloads through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. Rather than dropping a huge lump sum on your software (and repeating this payment each time you upgrade to a newer, better solution), you can effectively subscribe to the software solution you need (along with professional support for it) for a consistent and predictable monthly rate. Not only is this easier to budget for, you’ll know that your team is working with the best programs available.

Do Managed Services Sound Right for You?

Find out more about what a managed service provider can offer you by talking to the professionals at Directive! Give us a call at 607.433.2200 to learn more, and perhaps get started!