Thoughts, feelings, experience, anything...

Millettini

Guys,

A random one this but please bare with me...

I work for a small IT consultancy and, due to the current climate, we are changing the direction of the company. I am currently doing some investigation work in support of “unbundling” the services that we offer.

Currently we are branded as an IT Consultancy ..... and that’s it! What is an IT Consultancy? We offer a wide range of services from support to network design to application provisioning to infrastructure design and implementation and many more but does that come across in the brand we currently have? I don’t think so...

So what we are doing right now is trying to create some divide between the services that we offer so internally we can group people together in respect of their specialization so they can concentrate on that and that alone. This also works well with our customers as they can clearly see what else we offer as they might use us for one service and not realise we offer others.

We have done a lot of research on this ourselves and I guess in a nut shell the purpose is to help identify what/how we’d need to be able to do solutions in any given area.

This is where you lot come in. At the moment we are focusing on the solutions part of the business and as this seems mainly to be based around vendors and accreditations I know this is an area that you guys have a pretty good insight into. I know there’s a vast range of people that use this website from people practicing as a hobby all the way up to high level design and I would like to throw this out to you guys in all corners of the globe for any thoughts, opinions, views, feelings, suggestions etc that you might have on this.

The kind thinking is listed below:-

- Firstly a list of the key vendors that should be considered in the solutions/infrastructure world
o Citrix
o Microsoft
o VMware
o Cisco etc
o Think about the “3 layers of IT”
• Application
• Infrastructure
• Network

- A list of the accreditation programmes by technology area that are relevant in the bracket.
o E.g.
• Microsoft
• MCP, Gold etc
• Specialisms available in SharePoint, BPOS, exchange
o Requiring these accreditations (company/individual)

So if any of you out there have any opinions on this no matter how small please feel free to post as all are welcome.

Thanks for taking the time to read...

Pash

Although I think true cloud computing is yet to truly kick off, with virtualization and the "work from home generation" maybe this will become a good avenue to become practised in. Definitely get some engineers well practised in vmware/hyper V (Microsoft's offering).

Id also strongly suggest looking at Juniper products. They offer some really nice SMB/Enterprise security products that shouldnt be overlooked. This is especially useful if you have "smaller" customers with many branch offices and you want pain free VPN's between sites.

Millettini

Thats just the sort of input I am after, thanks Pash.

We definitely have cloud computing on our radar but agree with you that it hasn't truely kicked off as of yet. We used to have a couple of VCPs but they have left and we do have a couple of guys who are begining to travel down that route again but it's purely VMware. As for Hyper V thats something we're almost overlooked presently so we will def put that on the list.

Again with Juniper we've just kind of gone down the Cisco route without exploring the other avenues of networking so will investigate more into that.

Thanks again.

Anymore for anymore? Lets hear from you chaps...

WanBoy67

Millettini wrote: »

Currently we are branded as an IT Consultancy ..... and that’s it! What is an IT Consultancy? We offer a wide range of services from support to network design to application provisioning to infrastructure design and implementation and many more but does that come across in the brand we currently have? I don’t think so...

So what we are doing right now is trying to create some divide between the services that we offer so internally we can group people together in respect of their specialization so they can concentrate on that and that alone. This also works well with our customers as they can clearly see what else we offer as they might use us for one service and not realise we offer others.

Looks more like a failure in marketing to me, little to do with getting vendor partnerships IMO. Partnerships with vendors are nice to bring in extra business, decrease cost prices, increase profit margins and strengthen marketing campaigns - assuming you have the customer base & qualified staff to back-up those partnerships, as most are win-win partnerships. What you call "unbundling" I assume you mean targeting customers with specific solutions outside of your current customer base?

You would still market yourself as an all-in-one IT consultancy/solution provider but your marketing should emphasize the solution you want to push. Success in that area requires you to identify current or new customer bases which need a solution (be it VOIP, Virtualization, security etc.), if you do that your marketing campaign will be more successful than buckshot. Internal restructuring would be getting employees to pursue certifications to qualify for some of these vendor partnerships and placing them in to the right projects based on ability and potential but this doesn't automatically bring customers in nor will make them sales people.

Technicians are usually not great sales people and it's usually better to bring them in to do that side of things as they are more aggressive. But if customers don't know what you do, or that you could provide a solution to save them money or improve productivity then it's a failure in marketing. You don't need to be a vendor partner to offer a solution. That can happen later when the customer base is there.