You’ve just had a significant IT problem – system down or no email or critical software refusing to start up. You’ve made the phone calls to every supplier you can remember. Some are out of business, some may call you back tomorrow. Some just don’t want to know. Now you know. You are an IT orphan.
It happens to probably dozens of Irish small businesses every year, maybe even every month. They got their first PC back in the nineties or even earlier, eventually networked, reached something of a plateau a couple of years ago and have not bought anything much in the IT line since apart from perhaps a printer or a couple of new laptops for reps. The ‘system administrator’ is a slightly advanced user who knows a bit more than most – probably someone from the accounts office, usually the first implementation of computing, who is on hand most of the time. He or she can cope with most of the everyday small issues, like adding a new user or minding the back-ups. But that’s it. When something crops up that brings the business to a standstill, if the problem is not obvious and within that person’s limited span of experience and knowledge, it’s time to call for expert help. But who do you call?
If your business falls into that limbo, hope is at hand. In fact the situation is probably not too bad at all – at least by comparison with a few years ago. It is not just PCs that have become a commodity, as most business people recognise, but also servers, printers and most network components. So as far as the trade is concerned there is very little margin to be made on hardware. This in turn has led to a new emphasis on services and that certainly includes support and maintenance for PCs and networks in even the smallest businesses. For the last two or three years you can buy technical support for a single desktop PC through small networks and peripherals in micro-businesses all the way up to multinationals. Your only problems are the costs, which are not cheap but neither do they even approach rip-off, and possibly your own location. Such support services are available nationally, but if you are geographically challenged you may have to accept extra time or mileage charges for a technician call-out.
But what about that emergency, when you find out exactly how much of an orphan you are? The support companies we spoke to all said that they really do not have the capacity to handle one-off situations. When you think about it, there really is nothing in it for them. On the other hand, they will all quite happily take on a new annual client who comes to them initially with a problem or crisis. There is, of course, one snag: since by definition they have to give priority to their signed-up clients, you may find that you have to wait a day or two before the salvation/technician arrives. Everyone knows the propensity of serious business problems to choose the Friday of a holiday weekend. That’s when the firms with a support contract can relax but if you’re on your own you are going to remain lonely!
After the technician has fixed your immediate problems, the next step is to survey all of your systems and equipment and to confirm any special terms that might have to apply in your contract. “We start all contracts with an audit of the customer’s systems, the existing infrastructure, and then we make a set of recommendations,” says John Purdy, managing director of Ergo Services, the Dublin-based company that has been providing support and maintenance to some major organizations for nearly a decade and in more recent years has developed offerings for SMEs. He stresses that the analysis is free and carries no obligation – “The customer can go away and get whoever they like to check what we say or indeed to supply what we recommend. Of course we hope to get a piece of the work. But we have to assess the current situation anyway to be able to offer our support and maintenance at the right level, so it makes sense to be perhaps a bit more thorough and pro-active. We offer it as an initial good will contribution to planning and budgeting that we know from experience will be useful as a starting point.”
Size of customer is not an issue with Ergo or indeed any other companies we spoke to. “I suppose our smallest customer has just two PCs and of the 350 or so we support a sizeable proportion are in the 20-30 user network bracket. They are charged roughly according to their size and we make no distinction between equipment brands.” What sort of cost level is involved? By and large it is going to be in the hundreds per month, John Purdy says, and can be as little as EUR*30 to EUR*40 per PC or user per month. That of course includes the network, servers and operating systems and peripherals such as printers.
Dutron delivers
Dutron is a small Dublin systems and support firm that was set up by college friends Darren Philips and Darach Malone 14 years ago and has been quietly thriving ever since serving the computing needs of smaller firms on the south side of Dublin city. “Like most other companies in this line of business, we started selling and installing PCs and networks,” says Darren Philips. “We have a lot of loyal customers who have been with us almost since the beginning and what became obvious way back is that what they have valued is the fact that we are small, friendly and flexible – except for our waistlines! As selling PCs became unattractive, we recognised that it was our experience and skills that would ensure the business remained healthy.”
Dutron was always willing to help out a firm that found itself in technical difficulties, largely because of the friend-of-a-friend marketing which is all it has ever done. “About four years ago we decided that this whole support area needed a simpler and more consistent way of charging that would be transparent to the customers and easier to administer – and get paid – for us. Essentially, it is buying call-out time in advance as a set of tokens representing call-out fee and on-site hours. Customers draw down as they need, whether to solve a problem or perhaps to have new equipment set up or things like operating system upgrades or security and other patches installed.” Dutron has always been independent of brands but a new phenomenon is customers who buy Dell, for example, possibly because there are attractive finance deals. Then they simply pay Dutron to open the boxes and set everything up properly including network connection, applications, security and user privileges, etc. Rates are typically EUR*125 plus VAT for call-out and first hour anywhere in the greater Dublin area, but Dutron’s 30-odd clients on the token-based support scheme are on a €100 rate.
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