rTierra Managed Services
IT Without the Hype
The term "Managed Services" is often thrown about
to assist in providing credibility to a service provider’s methodology.
The services they offer may or may not be truly "managed".
Tierra Technology believes in IT without the hype. If you
take the hype out of this term it really means your computer consultant,
or consulting firm, is providing their service or the core of their services
at a fixed cost. How do they (we) do it?
How It Works
It’s simple. But it requires some initial work by both the customer
and the provider to make it happen. In a fixed price arrangment, the IT
firm truly wants to make your environment unbreakable because if a tech
never needs to be sent on-site, then the IT firm is duly rewarded. Initially,
the IT firm does a project that will culminate in the user
interface looking much like it did before — but with
back end changes to make certain user choices undoable or restricted.
Thus, the IT firm minimizes what can be
broken.
The customer has some work to do, too. You'll need to consider what operations
on a computer and network need to be flexible. A good IT firm will provide
a checklist to go through, and will follow up with good discovery
interviews of users and management. Thus the firm can really guage which
areas can be locked down, which areas can be restricted, and which areas
need to remain open. There's also a lot of administrative information gathering
like "who’s
the DSL or T1 provider" and "who’s the email host",
etc.
The end result is a robust environment that an IT firm can offer to
customers at a fixed price — and customers who enjoy seeing tangible
return on their investment.
What We Offer
Tierra Technology offers three packages and, while all share certain features and benefits,
only one is truly Managed
Services. rTierra Enterprise is our true Managed Service product. rTierra
Small Business (SMB) and rTierra
Small Office (SMO) are maintenance agreements that included a monthly
commitment for the SMB plan, and quarterly commitment for SMO.
We provide all clients with the initial framework that would bring them
to a point where we could offer them a fixed price. That work is
performed at an hourly fee for SMB and SMO customers. For those
interested in becoming rTierra Enterprise customers, we’ll build
the framework on a project basis, sometimes even waiving part or all of
the project fee with a multi-year commitment.
Call us today for a free on-site consultation!
More Information
Our Client Services Matrix outlines services for each plan.
Wikipedia definition of Managed Service Provider (MSP).
