Outsourcing NOC Operations Aligns with MSP Fixed-Fee Pricing Model

By Continuum Guest Blog 1

noc

Like many MSPs, Clare Computer Solutions found itself looking for a way to meet this challenge. Over the years, the company evaluated many remote monitoring and management tools to enable the delivery of managed services, and its added complementary services such as backup and disaster recovery. What challenged Clare is the ability to deliver services with quality and consistency without breaking the bank.

The solution: a remote monitoring and management solution backed by a 24 x 7 Network Operation Center (NOC) service that provides intelligent monitoring and full problem resolution.

“The presence of a NOC, whose sole purpose was to react to alerts, was a big selling point for us, and it really completed our managed services offering,” says Bruce Campbell, vice president of marketing at Clare. “Plus, it was priced in a way that we could just pay for what we needed as we grew our managed services practice.” He adds that the NOC also complements Clare’s staff “very well” and enables the company to be “an effective, around-the-clock service at a price that makes sense to small businesses.”

A little about Clare: It’s been around for the last two decades, providing a full array of hardware and software product sales, integration services, managed services and professional support to midmarket businesses in the East Bay region of San Francisco. With 35 full-time professionals on staff and years of experience, this sounds like the type of company that could handle services infrastructure and staffing needs on its own.

Instead, Clare decided to partner with Continuum because the NOC could provide the processes and resources required to monitor systems and respond to alerts with the same level of quality and professionalism as if they were doing it themselves – but on a much more cost-effective basis.

Engaging a NOC service, particularly one like Continuum with its per-per-use pricing, is a strategy for profitable growth and consistent service levels. Providing good responsiveness, quality care and a broad set of services are hallmarks for Clare, but servicing accounts can limit growth.  Leaning on the capacity and capabilities of a NOC enables MSPs like Clare to focus more on sales and marketing activities and customer relationships rather than constantly performing routine maintenance, filtering alerts and researching solutions to problems – tasks that can easily be outsourced to an always on 24 x 7 NOC operation that works behind the scenes on behalf of an MSP.

What’s more, Continuum’s NOC bills on a “pay-as-you-grow” basis, so MSPs only pay for systems that are managed and because you don’t have excess technician capacity, you always have 100% resource utilization.

In managed services, cash flow and growth are the lifeblood of a MSP business. As Clare discovered working with Continuum, a managed NOC makes more than a technology difference – it’s at the heart of a successful service delivery business.

Steve Ricketts - Continuum