Whelan readily admits that in the past, as a traditionally small support company, he would have been a bit concerned if somebody wasn’t out in a van and wondering if they were doing something wrong. But attitudes have changed radically since the business started using Teamviewer a few years ago.
“It’s revolutionised our business and the way we can deliver support to customers,” Whelan says. “We’re much more ready and willing to take on somebody to work in an office based support role because we’re able to work more so much better and more efficiently.”
In the old days, if three or four engineers were sitting in the office, he would have been worried that they “were not making money, but now they are on chargeable calls, closing tickets efficiently and quickly and making money for us”. Whelan adds that many customers have been happy to make the shift to remote monitoring and support. “For most customers, if you build up a relationship with them they are happy to let you do what’s best for them,” he remarks.
Unlike Conway, Whelan believes “there is still a need for the man in the van, but there’s not as much reliance on it. I wouldn’t be an advocate for getting rid of the man in the van, he’s still important.” He cautions that people are tempted to think they don’t need physical support when the start moving services to the cloud “but that’s not how it works. The cloud won’t replace everything. They’ll still need a piece of equipment, a PC or laptop or phone or tablet to access the cloud. There will always be a requirement for a man in a van at some stage.”
In recognition of this, Whelan reveals that while the company’s last recruit was a desk-based engineer, he intends to make its next addition, likely to occur some time later this year, a man in a van. “Good luck to companies that sell pure outsourced IT support,” he adds, “but they still need to
ring up someone like me when they have kit that needs to be moved or put in place.”
In any case, he argues that some of the company’s larger scale customers “love to see you there and they love to see the van”.
But Whelan acknowledges that the ability to provide remote support enables OmniSys to “do so much more with less. We can definitely do an awful lot more than we could five or six years ago”.
That’s certainly true for the company’s co-founder who has since moved to Warsaw and works remotely. It also meant that the company’s engineers were able to provide remote support from home over the Christmas holidays if required.
Making connections
Gary O’Callaghan, head of specialist IT consultancy CT Computing, which provides business solutions around the development of bespoke database solutions, has noticed a marked trend towards remote support in recent years. He says most customers are more than happy to use fast broadband connections to deal with their IT problems. “In any case, 80% of issues on the client’s side are software-related one way or another,” he remarks. “Of course, there are 20%, like a printer going down, where there’s damn all you can do remotely.”
O’Callaghan says he recently delivered a project where he never even met the client and never went to the site.
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