Getting Under The Covers

Managed services are no longer the great unknown but site visits to service providers should still be a must, says Hugh Dawson of Evros Technology Group

Companies are starting to embrace managed services more than ever before. “The term no longer represents an unknown for organisations” says Hugh Dawson, Services Di­rector Evros Technology Group.

“Whether it be to go down the total outsource route or look for something niche that fulfils a support gap in their organi­sation, the way companies are approaching us remains the same in that they have a full under­standing of what they want and how a managed service will meet their requirement. The shift in approach has moved to Evros to explain why we believe that we have the capability to deliver the service. In addressing this, the big questions now focus on our experience, reference ability, size, quality of solutions and skillsets, and, for Evros, demonstrating that is proving key to all our engagements,” says Dawson.

We are lucky in that more often than not; companies now want to come visit the service providers they are getting proposals from. In fact, we encourage it. The days of companies making de­cisions on the back of proposals or presentations are few and far between. While I do believe that having the ability to write a good proposal is part of the solution, demonstrating all that lies within it is more critical. We encourage demonstrations of our tools, how the service actually works and interactions with the day-to-day run teams and not just the frontline team giving the pre­sentations. For any organisation out there looking to outsource a service, part of the process needs to be a site visit. You need to get under the covers of what ser­vice providers are pitching and make sure that they can do what they say. The risk of selecting the wrong provider can be costly for organisations and companies need to factor this into their deci­sion-making.

We are now in the age of cloud services. More and more companies are looking at how they can move to an Infrastructure as a Service model, but with a managed service wrap. The message we are getting is that companies want to focus on their core business and outsource the Infrastructure element with management to companies like Evros who can deliver it back as a service and remove that head­ache from the organisations day-to-day business function.

You could be led to believe that the market is saturated with hosted and managed service partners/providers, but it’s not. It is only when you scratch the surface that organisations will see that there are only a very few truly experienced providers in the market that have the ability to do both. The growth of the pub­lic cloud through organisations like Microsoft and Amazon has allowed a raft of organisations to suddenly present themselves as cloud players without the experi­ence of being in the infrastructure business long before the cloud existed. We have seen a wide va­riety of organisations who have emerged in this area without the experience to take companies further than presenting them with an environment that they have not designed or built and we believe that this is the area of the market that Evros have built a brand and reputation around.

Evros are a managed service and cloud provider with our own designed, built and supported multi-tenant and private cloud platform marketed as Digital Planet (Evros’ dedicated Cloud Business Unit), that currently stands as the largest indigenous cloud platform in Ireland. A plat­form from which we deliver IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions from. But what makes us unique is that because we built and designed it, we fully understand it and in doing so, wrap a fully managed service around, it offering that to­tal outsourced solution. The cloud solutions are fronted by our own management portal which allows our clients to have full visibility and management function over their environments.

The success of our solution al­lows us to design purpose-built cloud solutions for organisations but because of this capability, we also leverage, where required, public cloud offerings. We are one of the few organisations that can be seen as agnostic in the cloud space, working with organisation to determine the best way for­ward.

I have seen the Evros Managed Service capability adapt and evolve with the emergence of cloud solutions over the past five years. Our strategy has been to build a world-class cloud plat­form wrapped with market-lead­ing managed services. We have built our offering across the ex­perience and capability of both divisions. It’s a unique position to be in, a company delivering man­aged services for over 20 years, now taking that experience and merging it with our Cloud Divi­sion of seven years.

We continuously listen to our staff, customers and the market when developing our offerings. The only way forward is to evolve, never standing still. Our R&D solutions are continually at the leading edge of the cloud market. As the phrase goes, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

November 2016 | The Sunday Business Post