External IT services: “and we have worked before”

If someone thinks that most of the companies in Russia are advanced in terms of IT thanks to the image of “Russian hackers”, then I will immediately try to dispel doubts. Not. And in Moscow, and especially outside the capital, there are a lot of quite successful companies, where people remember about IT only when something breaks fatally.

You can, of course, whine that the customer does not understand anything, does not want to change anything, and in general everything is sad. But money cannot be earned, and one of our areas is IT outsourcing. Therefore, we do exactly what the customer wants, plus we show how to do it right.

The dilemma is that the customer usually wants another crutch or hotfix, and we are trying to build a more or less normal infrastructure. To support it later. Pretty quickly, however, it turned out that this only makes sense if the customer is savvy. Such percentages are 20, the remaining 80% are those who are not ready to adopt a systematic approach.
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And so we came up with life hacking.

Life hacking

This thing is called "managed service". In short, we sell some part of the work as a ready-made service. We bring iron ourselves, we build this piece of infrastructure ourselves, we provide service ourselves. Speaking about the architecture of the IT environment of the enterprise, for example, it turns out a lot of a kind of microservices.

Using the print service as an example, the difference is this:

• The first level is when companies simply buy cartridges or refueling services, that's all. It may be a service contract, but it may not be. And if something broke, then they called the master - he picked it up, it all worked.
• The second level - cartridges are purchased + there is a service for a specific printer. Conventionally, once a month the master comes and looks at how things are with the equipment. I looked, changed what was broken, and left. Nothing useful in fact happens for the customer. The model is the sale of these cartridges in an interesting installment form.
• The third level - poopiyka. We take the supply of cartridges, this person, who is responsible for service, we cut the cost of it all into small pieces for the cost of a copy, that's all. In fact, almost the same, but the proportions could change somewhere. Again, there is no special value for the customer, except for small savings.
• The fourth level is an even more advanced thing when we say to the customer: “You guys have 100 printers that work hard and it costs some huge amount of money. Let us optimize it all - and it will be fine, we put the monitoring system, or let's additionally automate the system so that when the engineer arrives next time, he will immediately drive with additional cartridges, rollers or something else. ” And it already turns out managed print service.
• And the fifth level is the managed document service. We are not just saying that here you have 20 printers, let's replace them with one large one, but in principle we say that for some reason you are typing a lot. Half of what you type goes straight to the trash. Let's see, maybe some kind of business process generates extra paper. Let's cut it and in terms of business we will reach a new level. This is the case when IT already tells the business what to do - this happens only for very advanced customers. Therefore, now the majority stops at the fourth option.

In the third and fourth case, we can offer to do something, almost without affecting the end user. The offer looks like this: it will cost so much, but it will save you so much. The effect is very clear: roughly speaking, I paid 200 thousand, saved 320. The customer either refuses (then we lose nothing), or agrees. This is a win-win. And for us, win is not in the fact that we sold him a service that reduces our earnings (because with the introduction of print monitoring, the improper use of printers usually decreases and the number of copies drops by 15–20%), but that we came with customer to the next level of service.

Second moment

This was the first aspect. The second situation - very often we see that the customer inside himself is not at all engaged in the development of IT. A huge technical debt is accumulating, with which something needs to be done. Elementary to put the entire network on monitoring is already a problem in production. Come on monitoring, even actualization often causes such adventures that even write a book!

Jumping through two stages of technological development is expensive and difficult. But again, if we come outside and bring our service with our own equipment, the look changes. We want to save, and therefore we use all the most modern approaches. Being backward in IT is very expensive. Therefore, the customer receives a service that works without questions, and works as he should. All development for this service goes with us at once for many customers. Simplified - we fumble resources team, so now there is no downtime, and this is quite an optimal process.

All our microservices are combined into one bus, if necessary. If the customer takes a lot of services from us at once, it will be further integrated. We are trying to decompose everything into small services, and then connect them. And to upgrade the chain of business processes in turn.

How to go out?

The main question that the integrator is asked at the start of such work is whether it will be possible then to refuse and switch to another counterparty. Yes, it turns out, there were examples. If the service is already built, it is absolutely clear to the customer, then with a certain share of investments in competence (and, possibly, in hardware), you can leave the outsourcing and do the same for yourself if there is such a need. Or move to another integrator, the operator is also not a problem.

Elementary Wi-Fi for retail stores as a service or information on screens for advertising as a service is elementary - it’s quite simple to install your own hardware and control consoles, as well as support. Just need to spend money and know how to do it optimally. And still have a twisted platform (better open source) - that is, everything comes up against the trite experience. And the desire to do it inside.

Therefore, they now say that in the field of outsourcing, there is a tendency for customers to refuse to buy their own infrastructure in the foreseeable future and will buy it as a service. And this concerns not only infrastructure, but also solutions for end users. It is always easier to get a service, rather than iron, which is already perceived as just a tool a la hammer or nails. The main thing is to get the result quickly.

Total

In some cases, such things do not make sense. And it is better to leave the traditional approach when there is a license fee with KPI. Or when there is no opportunity to share resources between projects, or there is a need to sit inside the customer and deal only with this project. Managed services will not work then.

But where there is an opportunity to be flexible, there is a need to quickly implement something, upgrade or switch to a new solution, managed services are a great option for which the future is. This approach has long been used in the United States, where the level of “correctly counting money” is higher than in our economy. We traditionally slow down, but IT is constantly reducing this gap. In America, the "box" business is almost extinct. Everyone wants a service. And this is the right approach in most situations. For the same reason, the same clouds appeared, by the way.

The result is that we do what the customer wants, and then we simply show where and how he saves and where and how he can transfer capital investments into operational ones. If the customer agreed, we began to earn a little less on support (this is the case), but we took up the project of introducing something.

That's about a life hack. Perhaps you will come in handy.

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