Is this even possible?

hoktauri

Had the new company I am working for tell me they have a client that wants to get rid of their full time IT person/people and bring in on call support. For over 400 machines and who knows what infrastructure. This sounds completely insane to me, but is it possible to run all that in 10-20 hours a month?

paul78

It really depends on the client and the requirements. Hopefully, someone is doing their due-diligence and it's not going to be a bad deal all around.

leefdaddy

I work for an MSP.... 10-20 hours... no way.

It's possible for their IT support to be outsourced to an MSP, but to expect to spend that little amount of time on it, no.

hoktauri

I would be doing the work so I'll be making sure everything is covered. I just already have other commitments that would preclude me from being at this client anywhere near full time, the best I could do is maybe 15 hours a week.

jibbajabba

All depends (as always). I worked for a large MSP as well. Some massive environments could be managed in that sort of time, because they just worked. Others needed 5 people full time to avoid it falling apart.

The most important thing here is the contract. Make sure, if you were accept, it clearly states your involvement, time allocated, SLAs, fines for breaching SLA, what is considered a breach and so on.

Also have a survey of the systems yourself. Were they maintained, patched etc. So they have support contracts for hardware / proper licences (hard to call Microsoft on an unlicensed version) and so on.

Is it possible: Yes, if your contract says you only do 10-15hrs.

Would I do it: unlikely. Knowing they get rid of all their IT means 0 people apart from you. So your phone might ring 24/7/365 ...

cnfuzzd

A good rule of thumb is that you will average about a 25% cost savings over what you are spending now. Figure out roughly what they are spending now and work from there. Another way I have explained it is that the company essentially pays the same salary but avoids hard costs of benefits and the soft-costs of management/infrastructure.

Also, not a chance thats possible. 3 minutes per machine/user per month. Ok, maybe a chance, but a very slim one.

John

WafflesAndRootbeer

When I was doing MSP work, it was all over the place and hours would always be 40 or more because of the distance covered and the driving time. Sometimes I'd have to drive two hours each way to cover some godforsaken location in rural VA that should have been closed down.