What the Heck is Managed Services?

Managed Services—it’s the new technology buzzword. It seems like a lot of tech organizations are calling themselves managed service providers (MSP) these days. But the reality is that many of these organizations are actually pure support organizations that have slapped the MSP label onto their company. Unlike the proactive nature of a true MSP, these organizations operate through a break-fix model, providing services only when something isn’t working. If your current MSP has almost all of its people in support, it’s not really an MSP. And if you never hear from your provider except when a technician calls in response to a ticket, that’s not managed services.

The Break-fix versus MSP 

In a break-fix or support organization, a customer’s technology breaks, the customer calls the support organization, and the support organization fixes the problem. The support organization then bills the customer based on the amount of work it has done. As a result, the value of the support organization’s service is the time spent fixing things that are broken. It’s a reactive model, like emergency medicine. Support organizations don’t really manage your environment. They make money when something is broken rather than by trying to keep their customers’ environments healthy in the first place. They are not incentivized to make things better—their customers wouldn’t need them as often.

In contrast to the support model, MSPs provide proactive IT management. They manage your environment and perform services to prevent problems in the first place, including installing patches and updates, monitoring for warning signs, installing firmware on a firewall, recommending hardware upgrades or replacement, upgrading software or cloud services, strategizing, budgeting, and more. Utilizing managed services doesn’t mean that your technology won’t break or that you won’t ever need support. You definitely will. But in this proactive model, support is not the main interaction you have with your services provider. MSPs provide dedicated resources who know your environment intimately and understand your market, your business, and your IT goals. They provide managed and proactive IT—like preventive medicine for your IT infrastructure.

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Results-based Performance—turning the services value equation upside down

In true managed services organizations, the interests of your business and the MSP are the same—keep your business online and productive with few IT problems. When your IT environment is well managed, an MSP puts less human time toward fixing things. This means both the MSP and your business are more profitable. It’s the opposite of the break-fix adversarial value equation. Instead of the value being the number of hours a support company spends on fixing broken things, the value of managed services is based on positive results. Managed services is essentially results-based performance.

Why should your business leverage an MSP?

Every business today depends on technology in some way. Technology must be continuously up and running for your business to run successfully and profitably. If employees can’t log onto machines or the Internet connection is down, productivity and money are lost. The goal of managed services is to ensure you have the right IT environment to meet your goals and needs, to keep that environment working properly, and to help you plan for IT expenses instead of being surprised by unexpected ones.

At Logic Speak, we believe we can best help you succeed by playing a proactive role in keeping your IT reliable and productive. We bill you a reasonable fixed price per device and service for your environment based on its complexity. For that price, we bear the burden for the reliability, performance, maintenance, and support of your entire IT infrastructure. The less pain you’re in, the more profitable we are—we are incentivized for your success. In fact, we feel so strongly about our clients’ success that we created an entire department around our process-driven, strategic methodology–all designed with the single goal of keeping your IT reliable and productive.

Every Logic Speak customer, regardless of level of engagement, receives a dedicated Client Success Manager and Technology Alignment Manager who become experts on the client’s business, needs, and technology. These resources are laser-focused on your IT environment and making it work for your business. These dedicated resources and proven methodology can ensure the effective use of technology to help your business succeed.

Technology can be a mess. Let us take it off your hands, so you can do what you do best in running your company. Fill out the form on this page to schedule time with us.