Each year, our sister publication Computer Dealer News hosts the Channel Elite Awards to recognize IT Solution Provider for their innovation, leadership, and commitment for creating value for their customers. As Canada’s leading IT channel publication, CDN invited solution providers to submit their best work to nine different categories for 2013’s awards. Here, we present the case studies these award nominees put forward to us. Find out who the big winners are on Sept. 11 when CDN presents them at the CEA Awards Gala.
Learn more about CDN’s Channel Elite Awards 2013
Nominee: CMS Consulting Inc. from Toronto, Ontario
Managed Services Solution description
Infrastructure Guardian is a CMS Consulting Inc. managed service that provides complete health and performance monitoring and patching of network, server and application layers, whether the services are hosted in the organization’s own datacenter, or the cloud, 24 hours a day.
What makes your Managed Services innovative or original compared to the competition?
The Infrastructure Guardian managed service is unique in its structure as a hybrid offering where the client receives cloud benefits within a traditional on-premise installation. Our organization tracks server performance, detects problems early and provides the right information that leads to less downtime, faster MTTR (mean time to remediation) and trending information that aids in more accurate capacity planning around the company’s IT investments.
What were the benefits of your Managed Services Solution for your client and what evidence can you provide to show this?
With our specialized and demonstrated excellence in remote monitoring and reporting, Infrastructure Guardian is tasked with the responsibility of managing the performance of our client’s growing IT infrastructure. For example, Infrastructure Guardian was able to review and improve the overall health of our client’s System Center deployment and assume the management of their environment. During the first month, the team performed detailed tuning services, significantly reducing “noise” with false alerts condensing from 30:1 down to 6:1. Infrastructure Guardian worked closely with the IT Manager during the implementation process to make necessary changes to the system, including customizing and prioritizing alerts generated to a manageable level. As a result, the client was able to work seamlessly with Infrastructure Guardian by providing timely approvals to allow continuous improvements to take place during the implementation.
What are the main reasons that your Managed Services are better for the customer than an on-premises solution?
With limited staff and budget available to fulfill the IT infrastructure needs of many organizations, Infrastructure Guardian is trusted to deliver services that augment internal resources. Our organization provides critical infrastructure health services for which an existing FTE may not have the capacity to take on, in addition to their day to day responsibilities. Overall, leveraging cross-customer knowledge for proactive identification of known issues with specialized monitoring of hundreds of devices is the key value for clients: That is something on-premise structures cannot deliver as a single enterprise does not have access to this information from other companies.
How did the Managed Service improve the customer’s ability to server its internal or external clients?
The monthly reports provided by Infrastructure Guardian allowed one of our clients to plan for more long term remedial work rather than constantly fighting fires. For this particular client, after a two-month period, Infrastructure Guardian observed an average of 44 incidents per server, with an average of four incidents per server being escalated to the client’s contacts. With a combination of auto-resolution and alert filtering, the client had to respond to 40 fewer incidents per server, representing a 91% reduction in noise.
How does the solution further your client’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
Infrastructure Guardian’s unique and metric-driven capabilities allow us to pull information from an organization’s servers to design comprehensive dashboards that can be specifically targeted at green initiatives: For example, power consumption and/or cooling trending.