External IT services: “we used to work before”

If someone thinks that most of the companies in Russia are advanced in terms of IT thanks to the image of “Russian hackers,” I will immediately try to dispel doubts. Not. And in Moscow, and especially outside the capital, there are a lot of quite successfully working companies, where IT is remembered only when something fatally breaks.

You can, of course, whine that the customer does not understand anything, does not want to change anything, and in general everything is sad. But you won’t make money like that, and one of our areas is IT outsourcing. Therefore, we do exactly what the customer wants, plus show how it is right.

The dilemma is that the customer usually wants another crutch or a hotfix, and we try to build a more or less normal infrastructure. To then support it. Pretty quickly, however, it turned out that this only makes sense if the customer is savvy. There are 20 such percentages, the remaining 80% are those who are not ready to adopt a systematic approach.

And so we came up with a life hack.

Life hack

This thing is called a “managed service”. In short, we are selling some kind of work site as a finished service. We bring iron ourselves, we build this piece of infrastructure ourselves, we render service ourselves. Speaking about the architecture of the enterprise’s IT environment, for example, it turns out a bunch of a kind of microservices.

Using the print service as an example, the difference is:

• The first level is when companies simply buy cartridges or refueling services, that's all. There may be a service contract, or it may not be. And if something broke, then they called the master - he fiddled, it all worked.
• The second level - cartridges are purchased + there is a service for a specific printer. Conventionally, once a month a master comes and watches how things are going with equipment. I looked, changed what broke, and left. Nothing useful in fact happens to the customer. A model is the sale of these cartridges in an interesting installment form.
• The third level is a dig. We take the supply of cartridges, this person who is responsible for the after-sales service, cut the cost of all this in small pieces into the cost of a copy, and that’s it. In fact, almost the same, but the proportions could change somewhere. Again, there is no special value for the customer, except for a small saving.
• The fourth level is an even more advanced thing when we say to the customer: “You guys have 100 printers that work for wear and tear, and it costs some huge amount of money. Let us optimize all this - and it will be good, we will put in place a monitoring system, or let us further automate the system so that the next time an engineer arrives, he will immediately go with additional cartridges, rollers or something else. ” And it already turns out managed print service.
• And the fifth level is a managed document service. We are not just saying that you have 20 printers, let's replace them with one large one, but in principle we are saying that for some reason you are printing a lot. Half of what you type leaves immediately in the trash. Let's see if some kind of business process generates extra paper. Let's file it and from a business point of view we will reach a new level. This is the case when IT is already telling the business what to do - this only happens with very advanced customers. Therefore, now the majority dwells on the fourth option.

In the third and fourth cases, we can offer to do something, almost without affecting the end user. The proposal looks like this: it will cost so much, but it will save you so much. The effect is very understandable: roughly speaking, he paid 200 thousand, saved 320. The customer either refuses (then we lose nothing), or he agrees. This is win-win. And for us, win is not that we sold him a service that reduces our earnings (because with the introduction of print monitoring, the inappropriate use of printers usually decreases and the number of copies decreases by 15–20%), but that we came with customer to the next level of service.

Second moment

That was the first aspect. The second situation - very often we see that the customer within himself is not involved in the development of IT at all. A huge technical debt is accumulating, with which something needs to be done. It’s elementary to put the entire network under monitoring - this is already a problem in production. Come on monitoring, even updating often causes such adventures that at least write a book!

Jumping through two stages of technological development is expensive and difficult. But then again, if we come outside and bring our service with our own equipment, the look changes. We want to save, which means we use all the most modern approaches. Being backward in IT is very expensive. Therefore, the customer receives a service that works without question, and works as it should. All development on this service goes with us immediately for many customers. Simplified - we share the resources of the team, so there is no downtime anywhere, and this is a fairly optimal process.

All our microservices are combined in one bus, if necessary. If the customer takes a lot of services from us at once, it is all further integrated. We are trying to decompose everything into small services, and then connect them. And upgrade the chain of business processes in turn.

How to go out?

The main question that the integrator is asked at the beginning of such work is whether it will turn out then to refuse and transfer to another counterparty. Yes, it turns out, there were examples. If the service has already been built and is absolutely understandable to the customer, then with a certain share of investments in competence (and, possibly, hardware), you can get out of outsourcing and do the same at home if there is such a need. Or move to another integrator, operator - also not a problem.

Elementary the same Wi-Fi for retail stores as a service or information on screens for advertising as a service - it’s quite simple to install your own hardware and control consoles, too. Just have to spend money and know how to do it optimally. And still have a pre-screwed platform (preferably open source) - that is, everything rests on the banal experience. And the desire to do this inside.

Therefore, now they say that in the field of outsourcing there is a tendency for customers to refuse to buy their own infrastructure in the foreseeable future and will buy it as a service. And this applies not only to infrastructure, but also to solutions for end users. It is always easier to receive a service, rather than iron, which is already perceived as just a tool a la hammer or nails. The main thing is to quickly get the result.

Total

In some cases, such things do not make sense. And it is better to leave the traditional approach when there is a monthly fee with KPI. Or when there is no way to share resources between projects, or there is a need to just sit inside the customer and deal only with this project. Managed services will then fail.

But where there is the opportunity to be flexible, there is a need to quickly implement something, upgrade or switch to a new solution, managed services - this is a cool option, for which the future lies. This approach has long been used in the United States, where the level of “correctly counting money” is higher than in our economy. We traditionally slow down, but in IT we are constantly closing this gap. In America, the "box" business is almost extinct. Everyone wants a service. And this is the right approach in most situations. For the same reason, the same clouds appeared, by the way.

Bottom line - we do what the customer wants, and then simply show where and how he saves and where and how he can transfer capital investments to operating. If the customer agreed, we began to earn a little less on support (this is exactly so), but we took up the project of introducing something.

That's about such a life hack. Perhaps you will come in handy.

References

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• My mail is afineboym@croc.ru