Cloud

Off road, online

Longform
Image: Stockfresh

16 February 2016

The main benefit of a man in a van “is he can do some physical work” but even with complex systems like networks, a lot of configuration can be handled remotely, Conway argues. He believes that it will be clear in a couple of years time which resellers didn’t make the transition away from the man in the van model.

Managing change
Miriam Byrne, services director at Triangle, admits that her company still has a few men in vans to serve the retail space because it’s one of those areas where physical equipment and devices are critical to the running of the business and it’s important to be able to send someone out to fix them. “It’s much less relevant for the data centre or server room space,” she notes.

Hardware engineers have mostly changed jobs and moved on to work in managed support and managed service because it has become the norm for many customers that want predictability of cost, reliability of support and uptime availability. Cloud has intensified that trend because everything becomes less distributed in terms of the equipment as it is centralised into data centres. “Outside engineers are extinct in the cloud SaaS world,” Byrne says, “it’s all remote.” That said, cloud service companies need to have their own physical data centres that somebody still needs to physical manage.

She adds that there are far fewer men in vans in IT than there used to be. If customers move to a managed service, resellers can do it for cheaper and provide better support. Also, the man in the van is geographically limited by how far he can travel compared to his counterpart sitting in an NOC surrounded by lots of screens for customers all over the planet.

And she makes the interesting observation that for many IT businesses and their customers, the far more important man with the van is the eir man or the Vodafone man keeping the lines open that enable them to provide remote support and monitoring. That level of physical maintenance is still important when it comes to the lines providing the remote support and service capabilities.

Playing both ends
Unlike Conway and Byrne, Colin Whelan, director at OmniSys, believes there is still a place for the man in the van. That’s hardly surprising when you consider that the company website states: “Our ethos is printed on our coats, on our shirts and on our vans, and we want to continue…Keeping IT Simple!”

The company originated with two men in two vans in the early 2000s and built up to having three men in vans, an office-based workshop engineer and an admin person before it had to retrench back to three men in vans in 2007. Since then, it has managed to recover and grow to the point where it now employs 10 people including six engineers, three in the office and three in vans on the road all the time.

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