February 2010 / Qualities to Look for in Your Managed Service Provider

Usually we speak about various technologies or new trends in the IT industry in this monthly column. We have shied away from speaking too much about our core business operation in the interest of not being shameless self promoters. However, throughout the years we have developed a lot of great service offerings, and we feel that we have identified many best practices in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) space. So, we decided to use this month's Tech Brief to present what we believe are the most important things that you should evaluate in your existing service provider, or what you need to consider if you are going through the process of selecting who will provide outsourced IT services to your small or medium business.

Ask Who They Partner With

In the outsourced IT business, particularly as an MSP, there is truly no such thing as a DIY solution or approach. Every reputable MSP is leveraging a suite of applications and products to deliver their services to their customers. These typically include a PSA (Professional Services Automation) application, a RMM (Remote Management and Monitoring) application, as well as specific tools to support additional services that they provide. A quality MSP should highlight or at least be very willing to speak to their prospects about the products they use, which features they leverage within those tools, and the length of time and training they have received on those tools. If an MSP you are considering dodges the question, or claims they have built their own application in house beware! More than likely they are new to managed services and have not invested in quality tools, or worse, actually have developed a system in-house. A "home grown" system might sound great at first, but the effort involved in maintaining and updating business applications is a business unto itself; a business that has nothing to do with servicing your organization at a high level. Remember that part of an MSP's job is to identify "best of breed" technology vendors on your behalf, and that starts with the tools they use to support your business.

Go See Where the Burgers are Made

When you are talking to an MSP about supporting your business they are going to talk to you about things like remote support or help desk services. They will probably speak to your network being monitored by a Network Operations Center (NOC). That is the perfect time to ask for a tour of the facilities where your support will come from once you sign up for their services. You may have heard that you can tell a lot about a restaurant by walking through the kitchen. The same holds true when evaluating an MSP. Do they have their own NOC or do they outsource it? If it's outsourced what are the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or underpinning contracts between the outsourced NOC and your provider? Do those align with your business requirements? Are their remote support folks employees of the firm you are engaging or are they outsourced contractors? If they are in-house folks, when you walk through the place of business is it organized or is it organized chaos? Ask to speak to the person running the show in the service areas of the business. If they cannot produce anyone to talk to, or that person has to step away from solving a clients problem to speak with you there may not be enough oversight of the support centers to guarantee that SLAs to customers are being monitored and met.

What is Their Service Roadmap?

Service providers who are experienced and striving to be the best they can be live in a perpetual state of continuous service improvement. They should be mapping out new products, providing feature enhancements to existing products, and offering version upgrades to their applications or tools at least 12 months into the future. When speaking with an MSP ask questions like "What new products do you plan on releasing in the next year", or "are you planning to upgrade any of your vendor tools in the next year? What new features will be included with those releases?" If they cannot answer those questions for you they may not be thinking that far ahead themselves. If that is happening within their own business how will they think ahead for your business when you engage?

Competencies Count - Can They Support You?

IT people get certifications, and certifications are important to any IT service provider. MSPs are no different in this area. You want to make sure that you are engaging a provider whose competencies lie in areas that are business critical for you based on your IT infrastructure. Are you a Microsoft shop? What level of partnership do they have and what dos that entitle them to from a support perspective? Do you use nothing but HP infrastructure? Tthen you probably want to know that your provider has trained people on staff and a strong relationship with the hardware provider. This will ensure that they aren't learning as they go about supporting your network. As with their business partnerships or alliances, technical competencies are something any quality MSP should be willing to speak about in detail and at length. So ask the questions before you find out that the company you just signed up with has no idea how to support a critical piece of your infrastructure.

Meet the Staff, and Not Just the Salesperson

Salespeople are paid to be positive and to instill confidence, and good ones do exactly that. In the course of speaking with a prospective provider, ask to meet some of the engineers or technicians that will come out to do work in your environment. Ask them questions about how long they have been with the company, what their favorite part of their job is, or to describe the last challenge that they overcame on behalf of a customer. You will learn a lot more about the culture and attitude of the people you will work with day-to-day by speaking to the service department folks than you will get from the salesperson. The salesperson's role is to paint the best case scenario for you, so don't be afraid to scratch the surface a little to see if the gold flakes off or if the organization is sound inside and out.

Size Matters

For a lot of reasons size of the provider is a concern to customers who are evaluating outsourced providers. Some small customers feel that their account will get lost in the shuffle of a larger provider. Some customers worry that a small provider may not have enough diversity of staff to support all the different kinds of technology in their organization, or worse, that it's a 2 or 3 person shop where literally a flu outbreak in the office could bring support levels down for a week or more at a time. What truly matters is both how the provider will deliver support to your business and what the overall size of their company is. Ideally you should be supported in a way that gives you the feel or attention level that you would expect from a smaller organization but where there is enough staff and organizational size to deliver the benefits you get from working with a large organization. Specifically, staff redundancy and better leveraging on your company's behalf with third party vendors are things you should be looking for from an MSP.

Can They Build a Technology Plan for Your Business?

Before you sign up for services ask who is providing thought leadership relative to technology for your organization when you are on-board. Who is going to align your technology roadmap with your corporate budget for IT? Who is going to review the various reports that should be available from the provider about the service being delivered to your firm to make sure you are getting the true value out of your IT investment? If the organization you are speaking to cannot answer those questions, and doesn't have specific people in place to consult with you about your businesses needs, you may not receive those services once you sign up for service. Without an ongoing approach to customers' IT strategy, an MSP is going to have a difficult time delivering on its service commitment to your firm, which will result in reduced value to you. Make sure you ask how they will address long term planning on your organization's behalf.

Ask the "Big Picture" Question and See What You Get Back

Lastly, don't be afraid to ask what the MSP'S perspective on their market is. Technology is changing on a daily basis, and someone within the MSP should be looking ahead to new developments to make sure that the potential impact of those developments are being considered, both by the MSP within their own business and for their customers businesses as well. Ask them how they see their support offerings changing over the next 1, 3, and 5 years and see what their response is. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you hear back, or you may be surprised to find out that they aren't even considering it. Whatever the result, it's worth knowing before you sign up for services how forward-thinking the company you are meeting with is.

Closing Thoughts

Choosing an MSP as a technology partner for your business can be a time consuming and even exhausting task. There are many providers and even many different support models to choose from on the market today. Hopefully the thoughts in this month's Tech Brief provided you with a place to start on in your search, or gave you some additional areas to ask questions about that you may not have considered before. Here at SNS, we have heard all of these questions and more by the hundreds of customers we support, and we are happy to share that information with you. If you have any further questions about selecting an MSP that's right for your business please contact Staples Network Services by Thrive for more information.