Managed Services NOC Best Practices With Stephen Fitzgerald

VARsInTheCloud

What if you could expand some of the internal operations you re already running to your external clients? You d see a sizeable increase in your margins for one thing!

Here to explain some of the areas you ll need to address to do so, and a host of other managed NOC best practices you can learn from, is the one and only Stephen (Steve) Fitzgerald. On today s episode of VARsInThe Cloud, Steve is sharing that plus his personal experience and insights as both a provider and a consumer of managed service offerings.

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Steve has a long history of data center operations, ILTA, and monitoring subject matter expertise coupled with international leadership experience. He s built and led both cross-functional and cross-organizational 24×7 support teams in multiple global locations.

Some of his notable career highlights include having implemented a robust framework for service management at several companies, including implementation of ITIL service lifecycle management best practices. He also created the first-ever 24×7 Network Operations Center (NOC) for a healthcare private equity company, including implementation of several key monitoring tools across the enterprise.

If that wasn t enough, he was also a work stream leader and key contributor toward a $9 million project involving consolidation of 20 data centers into one hosted facility with managed services partner! Clearly Steve knows the NOC world and its best practices very well.

Today on VARsInThe Cloud, he delivers the goods on so many topics including the best monitoring tools available right now, what specific challenges you should be prepared for if you expand your internal support to your external customers and if there s an opportunity for you as a VAR to help customers with public cloud services.

In terms of tools, he recommends a few. He has used and his teams have used SolarWinds. He says it is an out-of-the-box, easy to set up and maintain product. It is also scaleable and low-cost, and can support a multi-customer environment. If you picked it up today, you could get at least half of your environment monitored within 30-45 minutes, and be up and running.

Another tool he recommends is one a partner he works closely with uses: Science Logic, especially their EM7 product. It is their monitoring tool that is really geared towards managed service providers, and has some nice cloud tie-ins.

a tool he brought into his new org. new relic – they rely on SAS-based app performance monitoring like Ruby, PHP, etc. you can get it up and running in 30-40 min right out of the box, and have your application performance data and see what your end user is seeing with their applications.

He shares several more on this episode (and links to all are below in the Resources section), but he wisely recommends not letting the tool dictate what your processes and procedures are. Instead set up your processes and procedures first, and then implement your tools.

Steve s wisdom continues when we talk about specific challenges you as a reseller should be prepared to address if you choose to expand your own NOC operations to your external customers.

Because there are probably things you are doing for yourself right now that you can make really good money on doing for your customers, this is worth considering. This is how industry leaders drive their margins from 12-15% to 45%, by providing your own intellectual property that you own, control and deploy. If you look at your business model there are things you are doing today that you can monetize.

He recommends preparing for a few potential bumps in the road when you do. For example, time zones. If you have an Eastern-based staff, you must account for the other time zones.

And what about language barriers – are there any and how can you pre-emptively adress them? It s vital that you make sure your outsourcing staff can address language issues and can communicate in understandable English, this is where a lot of outsourcing frustration occurs so you will want to discuss this area with all of the providers you are considering.

On this episode, Steve also explains whether or not there s an opportunity to offer help to your customers with public cloud services, and what service watch is. Steve s interview is full of insights and knowledge you ve just got to hear. Check it out on this episode of VARs In The Cloud!

Tweetable: It boils down to having your processes defined. Steve Fitzgerald

Episode Resources

• Steve Fitzgerald on LinkedIn
• Science Logic
• EM 7, by Science Logic
• Pingdom
• SolarWinds
• New Relic
• CBTS, Cincinnati Bell Telecom Services
• Rackspace
• CenturyLink
• TriCore Solutions
• Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/varsinthecloud

VARsInTheCloud uses ‘Show Notes Made Easy‘ to produce our notes & tweetables: http://shownotesmadeeasy.com/

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