Computer Support for Midsize Businesses

Progent's co-sourcing services allow your business to find the right balance between in-house and outside support by leveraging the capability of your in-house IT staff with the in-depth expertise of Progent's engineers. By delivering effective support when you need it, providing specialists for critical applications, minimizing travel costs through remote support, offering unique services such as customized, automated server monitoring, and charging only for the services you use, Progent gives you an affordable way to maximize the business value of your network.

Why Progent Makes Sense for Mid-size Businesses
Progent's staff of certified IT professionals have extensive experience with enterprise networks, allowing mid-size businesses to achieve world-class IT support without having to maintain large internal IT organizations or absorb the high cost of outsourcing network support to large national service organizations.

Working with Progent allows your mid-size business to:

• Avoid Turning IT Management Into Crisis Management
  Companies with 50 to 250 network clients often have sophisticated, enterprise-class IT infrastructures, but rarely have internal IT staffs with the depth and breadth of technical expertise to provide all the IT support that complex networks require. Internal resources are often overworked and budgetary realities do not permit hiring additional full-time IT staff.

  These environments can be subject to higher than average employee turnover, which often leads to situations where replacement support staff must focus on keeping the network running rather than enhancing it. Lacking in knowledge of the history, design, implementation, and architecture of the network, and with little time available between crises, new support staff are unlikely to be able to plan and implement effective network upgrades or migrate the system to keep up with changing business requirements.

• Let Senior Management Focus on Business, Not Network Hassles
  Many mid-size businesses are aggressively moving to outsourced support models for information technology because building up large internal IT staffs seldom pays off with strategic business advantages. Attempting to handle all IT service issues in-house can bog down senior management with the details of IT problems, yielding poor returns for time invested by such top talent.

  Companies need reliable, feature-rich, secure, and fault-tolerant IT environments to support their mission critical applications, but they recognize that it makes little business sense to own and build such systems themselves or to manage large internal staffs of IT personnel. Smart outsourcing or co-sourcing allows companies to concentrate their internal resources on areas that will bring them the greatest strategic and competitive advantages in the markets they serve.

• Migrate Quickly to the Best Network Technology
  Tough economic times have caused many IT environments to become woefully out of date as a result of IT budgets being slashed in the interest of survival. The starvation diets forced upon many business networks has created a burden of outdated information systems. This problem becomes apparent when the demand for new applications and customer-centered information solutions can’t be easily adapted to legacy systems.

  Increasingly, companies are being challenged by upstart competitors who are not saddled with outdated environments and can quickly introduce state-of-the-art, customer-friendly applications such as web-based eCommerce, vender extranets, customer portals, and integrated supply chain management. Often such major initiatives can't be carried out solely with existing resources. Adding to full-time head count seldom makes long-term economic sense for project-specific work, and companies typically don’t have the time to bring resources up to speed for business-critical projects. In these circumstances, it can be very cost effective to engaged outsourced resources that can solve problems immediately.

The scope and depth of Progent's consulting team offer a unique array of advantages to businesses wishing to increase the productivity of their information network within an affordable budget. These advantages include:

• Best Practices
  Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco certified experts average longer than ten years of real-world industry experience, in the trenches of network support, executing a wide range of IT tasks for a large array of businesses. Each Progent support professional shares a proven set of personal best practices which are incorporated into shared best practices standards that Progent instills in its support staff. This ensures that you get not only world-class IT skills, but also a support engineer with proven methods for using computer knowledge to solve actual IT problems rapidly. Find out more about Progent's best practices for network consulting.

• Value Pricing
  Progent's pricing policy is to bill for online support and on-site visits per minute. As a result, you are invoiced only for received services. Progent does not demand a higher rate for off-hours or urgent service, and Progent does not bill for travel time except for urgent calls where on-site work is less than four hours. Also, Progent imposes no sign-up charge and requires no monthly commitment. Many service firms demand substantial minimum payments or charge in increments of a quarter hour or more. Progent's one-minute pricing granularity does away with huge bills for quick repairs so you will be less tempted to permit minor issues to stay unaddressed until they become big problems. Find out more about Progent's value pricing for IT outsourcing.

• Full Documentation of IT Services
  Progent has developed a sophisticated support reporting system that stores and formats complete documentation for all delivered services. Unlike many freelance consultants or local service firms who offer minimal documentation or details of services done, every service provided by Progent is accompanied by comprehensive documentation. Every Progent staff member has access to the service documentation sent by every consultant to each customer. The practice of detailing and organizing service activity results in more efficient support and avoids a variety of common misfortunes such as when a service client is virtually held captive to a consultant who refuses to release vital service information. Find out more about Progent's documentation of IT outsourcing services.

• Knowledge Transfer
  Progent practices information transfer from Progent's support experts to customers. By educating clients to handle problems that are within their scope, Progent can concentrate on providing hard-to-find skills where Progent has few competitors. Small companies who work with familiar freelance consultants or who maintain in-house IT staffs benefit when Progent passes on information about critical technology and tested processes to make their networks more robust, secure, and productive. Find out more about Progent's knowledge transfer services.

Security Services
Progent offers a wide range of network security services to help businesses to identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities, defend against attacks, and recover from successful penetrations. Progent can provide remote and on-premise security consulting and also has developed economical fixed-cost security evaluation packages to complement Progent's regular by-the-minute billing. Progent's security assessment packages provide businesses with an economical way to comply with security standards mandated by state regulators or by customers.

Hosting Services
Progent's application hosting services such as Hosting Services for Microsoft Exchange offer a secure, affordable, and hassle-free alternative for managing mission-critical applications by combining the dependability of a world-class data center with the expertise of Progent's Microsoft Gold-certified support team. Progent's Virtual Data Center Hosting service gives midsize businesses a cost-effective option for hosting a variety of software platforms and key applications in a secure, fault-tolerant data center on a high-performance virtual host configured and maintained by Progent's network support experts.

Virtualization Expertise
Progent can provide expert consulting to help midsize businesses efficiently deploy advanced virtual server platforms in order to save money, improve reliability, and streamline disaster recovery. Progent offers and VMware virtual server help, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V support, and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 expertise. Progent's engineers can help midsize businesses design networks that get the full benefit of virtualization, implement virtual servers to enhance network performance, dependability, and manageability while cutting expenses, create and validate business continuity procedures that reduce downtime in the event of a catastrophic network failure, and provide continuing consulting and support for virtualized environments.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager-based Network Support Packages
Progent has developed special Network Support Packages based on the automated problem detection and analysis capabilities of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, a powerful network management platform that monitors the reliability, throughput, and security of your network servers and alerts you to problems before they can impact your productivity. Progent's Network Support Packages also include network evaluation, security assessment, Help Desk support, and the design of secure data links between your system and Progent’s support engineers. Find out more about Progent's special Network Support Packages for cost-effective IT support outsourcing.

To find concise details on Progent's IT support packages, check out our Spec Sheets for IS Outsourcing and Network Monitoring Packages, available in Adobe Acrobat files for easy downloading.

For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager helped a San Francisco Bay Area business achieve enterprise-class network management, read the Microsoft Operations Manager Case Study.

To contact Progent about Network Support Packages for mid-size businesses, call 1-800-993-9400 or send email to network-support-help@progent.com.