IT without capital costs is not an oxymoron



    Communicating with different customers, for several years we have been watching how the business is increasingly striving to get rid of the capital costs of IT. And this is quite logical.

    How to optimize your costs without losing quality in business processes is almost a rhetorical question, but in order to survive where the competition goes off scale, you still have to take care of it. Well, we learned to optimize, okay. Then it’s more interesting ... New tasks appear, and under them, investments in new equipment, software, and qualified specialists are needed. It is expensive, and inefficient.

    There are also companies for which IT is a non-core thing, for example: a contact center or Wi-Fi for a museum or customers whose profits are highly dependent on seasonality. This is, for example, an online store during the New Year holidays. Capital costs for such companies are a decent burden. It is especially important for them how to get IT resources in a short time and without serious money. There is such an option as managed services. This is when you pay monthly and forget about part of the hemorrhoids.

    In general, a managed service is such a service, something like outsourcing, not only in its classical sense, when part of the functionality is transferred outside, but with a much wider and more flexible approach (including financially). You get all the necessary resources and do not worry about administration and technical support. In short, everything is turnkey.

    We began to provide such services, and now there are several dozen of them. This is, for example, a contact center, Digital Signage, Wi-Fi analytics to “digitize” the behavior of visitors / customers. Some of them are on Tsiska.

    All customers who implement managed services have certain general conditions:

    1. There is no equipment and ext. funds for its purchase and service. In other words, there is no budget for investments, but there is an understanding of the return on service.
    2. There are no people who will be engaged in a new project (or even a business lives without its own IT team).
    3. I want to start quickly - here and now, right after signing the contract.

    Managed services are relevant for companies whose business is now inextricably linked with IT (banks, retail, etc.), for them it is an opportunity to optimize costs and establish inefficient business processes. But there are those customers who do not have an advanced IT unit, but business requires the introduction of a new high-tech service.

    The Tretyakov Gallery itself, of course, does not want to build its contact center (even for a very small number of operators). And he doesn’t want to outsource it entirely either. The solution is remote operator workstations in our data center. In the simplest case (without integration with CRM), deployment takes several hours. The “stuffing” has everything you need: outgoing calls, SMS and mailing lists, recording, IVR, reporting on operators. There are, of course, suchtechnological engines with synthesis and speech recognition, voice recognition, etc.). But if you have dozens of operators, such a KC will hit your pocket, and you won’t be able to launch it in a couple of clicks. But you also need to accompany.

    What is the beauty of KC as a managed service?

    1. All capital costs are transferred to operating expenses, which can be flexibly managed depending on the actual number of operators needed.
    2. You can grow in jobs at least several times in minutes. This is especially true during the holidays.
    3. We exclude our own administration (no need to grow an internal IT department) - all the work is done by our specialists.

    Financial performance: when using the managed service, the Tretyakov Gallery in terms of TCO for 5 years (25 operators) will save 71% of money for the creation and maintenance of a contact center.

    And here is an example from world practice: in a police station (235 users) in the city of Schaffhausen, a communication system was installed for which the vendor stopped issuing updates. It worked - and did not touch, but at some point it was necessary to expand. As a result, the police saved a lot by using the Managed Service On Premises model. The site was equipped with a new telephone system, including 6 lines for emergency calls. The system works 24/7, and Swisscom, which installed it, is fully responsible for its operation and maintenance.

    Digital signage


    Suppose you need to provide each of your service offices with digital screens on which content for customers will be broadcast - up-to-date information (promotions, discounts, special offers). Or, for example, roll out the navigation and event program at a large conference. Here you need monitors, PCs, special software. Plus, all this must be purchased, brought, and made friends with each other. Here - in more detail, how this process looks.

    Digital Signage is used to inform visitors about promotions, events and events; to display entertainment content in waiting areas (TV broadcasting, weather forecasts, exchange rates, current news, etc.); to build interactive processes of interaction / purchase without the participation of a consultant; create visitor profiles in conjunction with video analytics (recognition of gender, age) and show targeted advertising; organize an additional corporate channel of communication with employees.

    Financial indicators on the example of retail: retail wants to put all this in operating costs so that you do not have to buy licenses and hardware. Deployment in one of our examples took 5 days. Scaling in 5 days (although it depends on volumes). Administration is on us.



    Wi-Fi customer behavior analytics


    You go to the store, the phone sends a technical package to search for the network. The Cisco router (now they support this feature the most) catches it and looks at your MAC address, considers you, and then checks to see if you have been to other stores in the network before. More precisely, this makes another component of the system, the router is used only as a sensor. Plus, if there are at least three tsiskovskie access points, then you can draw up your map of the movement around the store with an accuracy of 2 meters (on new models). Details here: (https://habrahabr.ru/company/croc/blog/331894/)

    The result is something like this:



    Wi-Fi analytics helps to increase revenue due to the correct layout of goods and the distribution of sales consultants according to places of “attraction”, helps to evaluate the conversion from advertising campaigns and marketing events, to track the flows of repeat visitors; identify promising low-sales shopping areas.

    Financial performance: using a solution based on a managed service model in the TCO calculation for 5 years, the company will save 30% of money on creating and maintaining a Wi-Fi analytics system for customer behavior. With existing Cisco infrastructure, a little more.

    Video conferencing as a service


    The service is useful when you need to quickly raise a video conferencing system, or (and this also happens) someone from IT specialists already had experience in supporting VKS in a large company and does not want to plunge into this fascinating task again.

    Based on the comparison of TCO (hardware solution vs managed service from CROC) for 5 years, the customer will save up to 58% of money. The solution comes with Cisco Meeting Server as a virtualization core, that is compatible with any other vendor solutions.

    World example: the customer providedVideoconferencing for state organizations. The equipment is outdated and was not compatible with more modern counterparts. There was not much money and internal resources for modernization. APG provided the customer with EncoreB2B video communication platform with the ability to connect up to 18 participants to the conference in 15 minutes. At the same time, all conference management and technical support were on the side of the vendor. AGT also provided a video conferencing system on user devices and launched a call quality monitoring service. The performance of the videoconferencing on user devices, troubleshooting, management remotely provides a vendor support service. As a result, over two years the number of connected user devices has grown by 64.7%, the total use of the service has grown by 45.3%, and each dollar invested has saved $ 8.

    Optimized channel


    A good old story about how to optimize communication channels . Without laying new channels it is necessary to raise recycling. Most often, geographically distributed companies need it (read: the Far East, offshore rigs). It starts in 1-4 weeks (you need to get to the point).

    Financial performance of the optimization project based on 20 communication channels: in terms of comparison, TCO (hardware solution vs managed service) for 5 years, the customer will save 28% of money. Here, the savings are the smallest compared to other managed services, but still sufficient to think about it.

    An example from world practice: a company needed to centralize IT services on a global scale. In new centralized systems, access and data processing failures occurred. The internal team did not have the resources to manage the new technology. Teneo has taken over WAN optimization management at customer offices around the world. Result: optimization by 4.7 times (industry standard - 2.5 times) and a decrease in traffic volume by 78.6%.

    Still


    We also do as a service:

    • Managed Business Communications (when you need to combine email, VoIP, instant messaging, audio, video conferencing among themselves), for 100 connections over 5 years - 58% savings.

    • Management of information security services (installation of new generation firewalls and intrusion detection systems, cameras, access control systems).

    An example from world practice: a solution - a video surveillance system of 95 Cisco cameras on 3 campuses allows the customer not to spend the time of their IT staff on system maintenance, security officers can monitor the situation from tablets (now only one security officer is enough for one campus), general awareness of schoolchildren and staff about emergency situations increases.

    • Network Administration (LAN, WAN, Wi-Fi).

    World example: Due to inefficient use of IT and problems with service providers, JLL turned to Teneo for a managed WAN optimization service. As a result , the customer’s team had more time to work on innovative projects while constantly improving the quality of network service.

    Like this. I think, using the tables above, you can calculate for yourself the cost of owning iron and its own management and the cost of the same outsourcing with the provision of equipment. Well, or just write me, if you consider laziness, mail - SVrublevskaya@croc.ru.

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