IT Support Services for Legacy Systems - A lasting legacy, for now anyway
Maximising Efficiency Through IT Support Services
Teneo, a reseller specialising in optimisation technology, says customers have begun to take a hard look at the technology they already own.
“They are asking how can we make our organisations more productive, how can we use what we have in the best possible way,” says marketing director James Hall.
One of his customers, a firm of architects based in Birmingham and London, found it was taking 45 minutes to copy large AutoCAD files across the company’s wide area network.
Rather than buy a new server, or increase the WAN bandwidth between offices, the firm’s IT manager deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in both offices, which has cut the time taken to open AutoCAD files across the WAN to next to nothing. Staff in both offices can work on the same version of the file.
The network optimisation works with advanced delta caching technology that reduces network traffic.
“If traffic has already gone across the network, then we don’t send it again; we need only send the differences between two files, rather than all the similarities,” says Hall.
“There are two benefits to reduced network traffic: applications work much more quickly; and we show clients they can postpone or cancel investments in extra bandwidth or infrastructure.”
For some resellers, who have had a long history of in-house service, employing a third party is not attractive.
“We would never consider a third party because we would worry about the quality of the job and the definite availability of the service engineer,” says Phillip Mitchell, managing director of Epsom-based VAR IntraLAN.
“We employ two people full time on our own helpdesk for our SME customers, as well as 10 field engineers. The helpdesk is central to our organisation – if we don’t provide service to our customers, they may look elsewhere.”
