Posts

Could Co-Sourcing Be the Right Choice for Your Business IT Needs?

/in /by

handshakeEven in an era of professional IT services, businesses aren’t yet willing to get rid of on-site IT staff. In fact, those support and development team members are usually crucial to business operations. They have years of experience and knowledge that can’t be replicated by a third-party provider.

But as businesses see the value in outsourcing services to talented service providers, a new term is emerging for the hybrid model seen in many companies today. Co-sourcing is the process of having a company’s IT department work in cooperation with third-party services to ensure a company is armed with the tools it needs to succeed.

What is Co-Sourcing?

Co-sourcing is a compromise between on-site support and outsourcing, with businesses choosing to retain some or all technology staff while still sending resources to the cloud. With co-sourcing, a business sees IT outsourcing as a partnership, rather than a process that requires full reliance on vendors. Co-sourcing gives the business a greater sense of control, since they’ll have on-site representatives looking out for their needs.

Business Meets Technology

In many instances, businesses are finding that on-site technology staff become more business-based, working on such tasks as business development and project management. Menial, everyday tasks can be offloaded to the third-party vendor but those tasks crucial to business development can be handled in-house. An IT team can take over the task of finding and overseeing deployment of great apps that can improve administrative tasks, for instance, while the vendor handles daily server backups and system updates.

As the cloud eases the burden on IT staffs, many are choosing this co-sourcing model, leveraging technology team members to put IT to use in business processes. This can provide personnel to handle everything from data analytics to user experience testing. All of this will put businesses in a position to tackle the technology challenges ahead without compromising day-to-day computer and network support.

Getting the Most Out of Outsourcing

/in /by

When you’re a small business every dollar you spend is important.  So when you have to hire outside help, especially outsourcing IT needs, how do you insure your money is cost-effective.  One word: benchmarks.

Traditionally, benchmarks have been touted by outsourcing firms as ways to compare themselves to their competitors.  For example, they would say, “we X company have decreased system downtime by Y percent on average.”  They would use these benchmarks to help set the price.  However, with the changing market, the usage of benchmarks has changed.

Today, benchmarks should be used to ask” what is the best usage of company X’s resources for me?” rather than “how much should I pay company X?”  So how do you decide what is best?

Get a Baseline

To judge how effective a project is you need to know the amount and rate of change.  That’s status after compared to status before.  Outsourcing companies can spin the after data much easier than the before data.  However, you should take a stock of what position you are in.  In the downtime example, if you’re having trouble with your network crashing, you should time how long your network is not working.

Unit Consumption

In this day and age, it’s important to know what you want.  After getting a baseline you should work with your IT service provider to decide how much per unit of improvement will cost.  That way you can zero in on what you want and what you can have.

In-Check

As always, keep yourself in-check.

Why IT Consulting?

/in , , /by

For some business owners, the notion of outsourcing anything to an outside firm might seem a little scary. It’s attractive to have everyone who’s doing anything for your company working as a dedicated full-time employee.

But these days most businesses can benefit from advanced technologies like cloud computing, remote backup and systems that integrate computer and phone networks.  Often, you won’t even know what technological solutions make sense for them until you see them in action.

That’s where IT consulting comes in. An IT firm can look at the big picture and suggest what investments might make sense. Because they work with multiple clients, they have up-to-date expertise in what other companies are finding useful, which means you can benefit from the experiences of others.

Consulting firms also have a surprising cost benefit. If a company has its own internal IT department, a handful of employees probably have to do everything from overhauling the entire email system to setting up voicemail for a new hire. That means they have to be seriously overqualified—and overpaid—for some of their assignments. With an outside firm, you’re hiring a team that includes people with a variety of experience levels. Often it also means you can have several IT professionals on hand when you need them and none when you don’t.

Here’s another thing about outsourcing IT—it’s probably inevitable, at least for some things. More and more of us are using the cloud every day, even if that just means throwing a file into Dropbox or sharing something on Google Docs, and that means trusting our data to outside parties. IT consulting firms can help businesses do these kinds of things in ways that are more secure—and that also offer extra benefits like emergency backup.

IT firms can work with companies a variety of ways—from troubleshooting email problems to developing a cloud strategy for connecting remote offices. But you probably won’t know which solutions might make sense for your office until you start asking.

Spirinet Named One Of “Next-Gen 250” By CRN.com

/in /by

IT Support and IT Outsourcing company Spirinet has been named one of the “Next-Gen 250” by CRN.com.  The “Next Gen 250” is awarded to companies who have zeroed in on lucrative and emerging technologies, among them cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, unified communications, business analytics and business intelligence.  All of the companies on the “Next Gen 250” have only been in business since 2000.

“Being named to the “Next Gen 250” is a great honor,” says Kirill Bensonoff, of Spirinet.  “We pride ourselves on our ability to identify what upcoming technologies will offer the most value to our clients.  At the beginning of the company it was outsourced IT, and as we grow we find that cloud computing has become a key component to our offerings.”

Mr. Bensonoff adds: “Few industries move more quickly than technology, but having a set of core values that define your company’s decision making is extremely helpful.  Our business decisions have always been made by asking these simple questions: How does this technology make life easier for our clients?  What value does it add?  Is it just a new way of doing something, or a better way?”

For more on CRN and CRN’s “Next-Gen 250”, please visit: http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/231500383/channel-up-and-comers-crns-next-gen-250.htm?itc=refresh

About Spirinet:

A premiere provider of IT outsourcing and consulting services, Spirinet has become the full-service IT department of choice for small and medium-sized businesses all over North America. With unique remote technology capabilities Spirinet is also supporting companies with offices world-wide. They are headquartered outside Boston, MA.  They can be contacted at their website computersupport.com, or by phone at (877) 342-5677.

About CRN.com:

CRN.com delivers strategic information and useful business tools that technology integrators use everyday.  Their website is: crn.com.