IBM Offers Outsourced Technical Support Services to SMBs

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is offering its SMB resellers an avenue to offer to their customers single-source technical support services provided by the vendor.

In extending its Managed Vendor Support Services (MVSS) to SMBs, IBM’s thinking is to make the overall pie for its technical support services that much bigger by including the customers of those organizations. The attractive part of the deal for SMBs is the advantages gained from IBM’s global reach, technical professionals, parts network and logistics, along with price benefits over the cost of maintaining in-house skills or multiple regional service contracts.

The MVSS services include call center support, customer problem resolution and engineering support, onsite services and parts inventory management, stocking and delivery.

“Through the expansion of Managed Vendor Support Services, IBM can help businesses of all sizes meet service level expectations and act as a trusted IT adviser,” said Juhi Jotwani, IBM vice president, Multi-Vendor Services, Technical Support Service. “As a result, companies don’t have to spend their time coordinating technical support services. And a single focal point may help to hasten recovery from, and potentially prevent the occurrence of, outages.”

Ultimately, IBM wants the services to be seen by SMBs as more than mere cost-cutting. According to the vendor, SMBs signing on for MVSS will set themselves up to calibrate the technical support needs of their customers in locations around the world and gain the ability to adjust their deployment model accordingly.

As an example, the vendor pointed to SMBs in the retail, manufacturing and medical industries as good candidates to adopt the service, showcasing Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), which has some $730 million in annual sales and 19,000 customers worldwide.

Concerned with maintaining its competitive edge, Riverbed’s technical support team began working with IBM’s field service organization more than five years ago to help the company deliver on-site services to minimize downtime for customers. Riverbed said that the collaboration resulted in an improvement in the performance of customers’ applications and network access to their data and a significant increase in transmission speeds.

“IBM gave us the opportunity to focus on IT innovation, and helped us liberate businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility—all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers,” said Scott Downie, Riverbed Worldwide Support senior vice president.