The firm is ready to deploy highly qualified network and IT engineers anywhere around the country at the drop of a hat, but it does so only in partnership with existing resellers. Their customers therefore have the comfort of knowing that they have access to highly qualified engineering support without the worry that their business might be taken away from them by a predatory competitor.
Comms-care has been active in the Irish market for just over three years, and in September last year appointed Richard Daly as Irish country manager. With a background in engineering consultancy Daly heads up a local business that comprises 10 engineers. Eight are based in Dublin, with one in Munster and another in Belfast.
“They are all full-time employees of Comms-care,” says Daly, who points out that the company also has 85 certified Cisco engineers in the UK who can be called on to provide support to their Irish colleagues if necessary. The firm employs about 100 engineers in the four countries in which it currently operates: Ireland, UK, Spain and Germany.
As the name suggests, Comms-care specialises in networking and communications services. All of its engineers are certified to some degree with recognised qualifications from Cisco, one of the primary network equipment companies in the world, or Microsoft, which dominates the market for operating systems on desktops with a significant presence at the server level. It is also a leading supplier of e-mail servers with its Exchange product.
“We do a lot of voice installations,” says Daly. “But there is currently a big move towards unified communications.” Daly says Comms-care has, or at least has access too, the largest number of Cisco-qualified engineers in the country and this gives the firm a vital edge, which it exploits with its business model.
So why wouldn’t such a company deal directly with end users instead of having a strict policy of only supporting other companies in the channel? “We decided as a company that the channel was the way to go,” says Daly. “Our relationships with other companies are based on trust. They know that we are not going to compete directly with them, and that is a big comfort for them.”
The notion of outsourcing IT support to outside parties was probably slower to catch on in Ireland, given the size of the local market, than it was in other European countries but it is well established now. The trouble is that such companies typically have several customers to keep happy, and Murphy’s Law dictates that these always happen just when a service company is fully stretched elsewhere. Inevitably, a maintenance company will sometimes find itself unable to meet the terms of its service level agreements (SLAs) with all of its customers at the same time, no matter how “realistic” is their wording.
In such situations, a maintenance company has traditionally had two choices: it can either fail to meet its agreed service level or it can subcontract somebody else to help them at short notice. The latter option runs the risk that the person or company who has been enlisted to help is given a golden opportunity to impress a new customer.
By restricting its interests to the channel community only, Comms-care presents resellers with a third option: the ability to offer a more dependable service to their customers without risking losing them.
Daly claims Comms-care’s services are “pretty unique” in the Irish market. “Other companies have tried to go down this route of supporting the channel but they were always resellers in their own right as well,” he says. The conflict of interest was apparent.
Most of the company’s business in Ireland is concerned with maintenance and rapid response to problems occurring on end users’ sites. “About 70% of our business is break/fix,” says Daly. “We have a standard SLA that promises a four-hour ‘to-site’ response to deal with a call-out.”
Comms-care also participates in the delivery of major contracts by hiring out its engineering staff to channel companies so that they can bring their expertise to bear on new installations. This is an example of what Daly calls a ‘white label’ operation, in which the Comms-care staff work on a regular basis on site for another company. As far as the end customer is concerned, all of the technical staff are the responsibility of the reseller they appointed to perform the task but in fact, they remain employees of Comms-care.
“Resellers find it cost-effective to use us,” says Daly. “They know the level of service and expertise they will get from us and we provide this expertise at a reasonable price. It’s much more cost effective than hiring a load of new staff themselves and then having to let them go at the end of a contract.”
Daly puts a lot of store in Comms-care’s use of certified engineers. “The big companies in the country, whether they are local of multinational concerns, like to standardise on products from the major companies such as Microsoft and Cisco,” he says. Both of these companies have well recognised certification programs for engineers working on their products and as a consequence, people buying in IT services look to see that the providers have certified engineers on their staff.
Cisco, for example, has three levels of qualification which, in ascending order of sophistication are: CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate); CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional; and CCIE (Cisco Certified Internet Expert).
In addition, once one has completed the CCNA course there are specialisations in subjects such as Network Security and Wireless LANs.
Microsoft offers a very broad range of certifications, starting off with specialist certifications at various levels for individual products, such as Exchange or SQL Server. At the lowest level one can be accredited as a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) on a single product before progressing to professional level as a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP).
“It has sometimes been a challenge in Ireland to find engineers with sufficient accreditation,” says Daly, “But all of our engineers are at least accredited to Cisco CNNA level with the most experienced having the highest CCIE accreditation. Many of our engineers are also Microsoft Certified Professionals.”
He adds that certification does not stop there, with some of the company’s engineers choosing also to specialise in Unix, which has a large installed base in Ireland, particularly in the larger companies.
He insists that people value the engineering culture in the company, which benefits Comms-care in two ways. Firstly, it brings credibility to the consulting arm of the company and secondly it makes Comms-care a desirable place for talented engineers to work in. Having the right engineering expertise in the company helps it to adapt to the different needs of resellers who will each approach their relationship in their own way.
“Different partners use us differently,” he says. “But we offer a reliable service at a good level of pricing and resellers soon realise that over time. Instead of having their own people on call, they can use us and know they can depend on our service.”
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