oceans of opportunity - delivering managed services across the data centre
TRANSCRIPT
Oceans of Opportunity
Delivering Managed Services across the Data Centre
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Oceans of opportunityWith Jason Osmond
Since joining Ocean Intelligent Communications in 2012, Jason Osmond has spearheaded their marketing and business development strategy and service alignment. In this interview, the group sales director talks in detail about Ocean's all-important partnership with the long-established London data centre, City Lifeline and explains the intricacies of providing top quality and 24/7 managed and IT relocation services.
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Managed services As an introduction, outline your role and involvement with City Lifeline… At Ocean, we split our business into different divisions including managed services, cloud services, IT relocation and unified communications. My role and responsibility is to have an oversight of all these areas of business and make sure we are providing the right services to our clients to assist in how they develop and run their businesses ensuring that we have the right partnerships in place with third party organisations.
My role in terms of the relationship with City Lifeline is to make sure that we are providing a collaborative approach and giving our clients the best value.
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You partner with City Lifeline in the managed service area – what are the benefits of working together? "City Lifeline is the ideal location for clients to be putting their critical infrastructure" We have a unique arrangement. City Lifeline, as a data centre provider, has fantastic credibility and service offerings. Their facility is ideally situated to provide colocation services and disaster recovery services. By partnering with them, we give customers that additional layer of support when moving critical hardware into a data centre. We can complement our clients' IT teams through a combination of our core infrastructure located in the Ocean private suite in the City Lifeline data centre coupled with skilled staff who provide the managed service overlay for that hardware. They have engineering resource on hand and our 24x7network operation centre is in the same street so we can be onsite immediately.
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With City Lifeline we have developed our managed services offering a stage further so clients do not actually have to own their equipment. We provide the option of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), a virtual data centre and cloud storage facilities, so clients can combine their own physical hardware at City Lifeline and also take up our virtual services.
What are the key offerings that make up Ocean's managed services? "A Managed Service from Ocean means that we take full responsibility and accountability for the ongoing operation of a particular technology piece, a particular area of IT infrastructure or an organisation's complete IT strategy from an outsourcing perspective" I want to define what we mean by 'managed services' at Ocean because the IT industry is a bit of a minefield at the moment and people mean a million different things when they say 'managed services'. None of it's wrong.
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When we are talking to existing clients or potential new clients and they ask for a managed service, we take a step back and ask them what they are trying to achieve, as it can mean so many different things. Over the years it's become a bit of a buzzword - it's one of those catch phrases that everyone has latched onto and a lot of people have taken the simplistic view that a managed service is just a glorified break-fix support contract It's so much more than that. Our initial aim is to understand how a business operates and that's critical with any engagement because we need to make sure that our recommendations are in line with the company's future plans, growth and expansion and how they want to be perceived by the outside world. The recommendations that we make are long term. We don't want to sit with a client in three year's time and hear that they are making some business changes and we have to rip it up and start again. We need to get that partnership right from 'day one' and the only way we can do that is by really getting under the skin of how a business operates.
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By working with our clients in this way we can provide a customized service offering that meets their needs rather than a “one size fits all solution”.
What key points do buyers wanting to procure managed services need to understand? "We should know about problems before our clients do" Organisations need to clearly map out what they are trying to achieve from a managed service in terms of staffing augmentation, business process and culture before attempting to engage in the process of selecting a provider. At Ocean we can assist in mapping out this plan.We start by looking at how a business works and operates and then we work with the client to provide a managed service for the component part they are talking about. That might be a server, communications infrastructure or virtual data centre environment. We'll make sure that it operates in line with their business needs and monitor the service on a proactive basis.
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Our ultimate aim is to tell clients that there was a problem and that we've resolved it and done x, y and z to make sure that problem doesn't happen again and that we are back to the status quo. A lot of companies still operate in a very reactive way, firefighting the whole time and our aim is to make sure that our clients don't do that firefighting. Our managed services ensure a constant analysis of the environments that we are supporting. We'll make sure that best practice patching and upgrades are carried out and we'll be looking for trends and working out patterns in that customer's environment so we can make recommendations before the fire starts.
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What are the top challenges you have experienced with clients moving over to your managed services? "Change is scary for most people and some people have the attitude that it's better the devil you know – it's not broke so don't fix it" One of the most common challenges when we work with a new client is that they have let their IT estate get out of hand. They have probably got solutions that work, but the reasons behind these solutions are back in the history books somewhere.
Knowledge hasn't been updated, knowledge transfer hasn't taken place when staff have left and documentation hasn't been kept up to date. We often walk into an environment that is working, but no one is quite sure why it works in the way it does. There is no strategy for moving forward with business change.
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One of the biggest challenges is unpicking what is in place and that is quite a painful process for both the client and for us. But we think it's an effective way of starting the process off on the right foot. We lift up the bonnet, look at what is actually underneath it - warts and all - and once we have a clear picture we can formulate a strategy. What advice would you give to anyone thinking of choosing a managed service partner? "This is our lives" Our entire business is set up and structured to provide support services, managed services and technical infrastructure services to our clients. That's where all of our investment as a business goes and where all our training and development is invested.
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We only employ people who have the right technical capabilities and skillset to provide these services. With the best will in the world, it is unusual for an individual business to make that level of investment in their own IT department, because they are geared up to provide a business service, not IT support. We also have the advantage that we deal with a wide range of different organisations that operate IT in a multitude of different environments, so we can take knowledge and experience from multiple industries, market places and technologies. Our staff are exposed to emerging technologies in the market place on a daily basis and are therefore much better equipped to deal with the 'weird and wonderful'. An individual organisation's own IT department can become quite blinkered and 'siloed'. It's just human nature. You can't be involved with all of those services if you are only operating in one business unit.
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Talk to us about delivering Managed Services across the Data Centre.
City LifelineLifeline House,80 Clifton Street,London, EC2A 4HB.
www.city-lifeline.co.uk
T: 020 7247 6066
John [email protected]
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Ocean Intelligent CommunicationsStapleton House,110 Clifton Street,London, EC2A 4HT
www.ocean.eu.com
T: 020 3487 1800
Jason [email protected]