Network Outsourcing for Midsize Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent's staff of Microsoft and Cisco Certified consultants average longer than a decade of hands-on professional experience, at the forefront of IT service, executing a broad range of technical tasks for an extensive mix of clients. Each Progent support professional shares a refined collection of best practices that are incorporated into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its consulting personnel. This ensures that you get not just world-class technical capability, but also a support engineer with field-tested methods for applying technical knowledge to repair actual network problems rapidly.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent's staff of IT engineers is composed of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than a decade of real-world experience per consultant, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts bring a tested set of methodologies for resolving network issues, planning projects, and delivering professional support. The technical scope of Progent's engineering team allows Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with task-relevant skills and an effective approach for finding fast and inexpensive IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a team approach to solving the most stubborn network issues. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts, Progent can rapidly and efficiently handle even the most challenging issues. Working with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of complex deployment and configuration jobs annually gives Progent a unique perspective on which approaches work and which ones do not. Complex software interactions are a minefield for even the most talented consultants unless they have an extensive and varied history in real-world work with a wide range of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate experience of its senior engineering personnel to create an internal, company-wide set of leading practices intended to promote fast, cost-effective resolutions of technical problems and to track and optimize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a strong focus on customer communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative technology integration, business management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences developing challenging technical solutions while working as a network designer, program developer, project manager, implementation professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that staff consultants undergo ongoing product and methodology education that contains important lessons and procedures for technology adoption that have been developed from the experience of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This results in continually more effective provision of support to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive documentation for all delivered support. Each authorized Progent team consultant has complete access to all the details of support provided by any staff member to each client. This history of problems and resolutions, as well as false alarms and miscues, is arranged as readily accessible in-house database that allows Progent's support professionals to communicate their knowledge corporate-wide to ensure that the general efficiency of Progent's support grows over time. This support history also reduces your dependence on a single engineer by making it possible for one Progent consultant to take up where another left off while saving time wasting getting up to speed on your network setup. An additional advantage of Progent's support documentation system is that your business can more easily take on network management duties internally if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework methodology for delivering support. MSF breaks down projects into distinct and manageable phases that reduce the risk of a project falling off track. Every step creates a strong foundation for the completion of later phases. Planning and integration requirements are defined at the start of the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and resolved before customer workflow is disrupted. This also keeps expenses from going through the roof due to unforeseen problems during production roll outs. All project components are documented to build a detailed database of consulting services provided and to help in ongoing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the world's largest technical databases and resource pool. Among the most powerful technical knowledge bases accessible by Progent's consultants are the industry best practices incorporated into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties for use with Microsoft Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring platform used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs consist of specially designed scripted rules that can react to events, thresholds, and alerts tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give valuable advice on how to deal with specific problems by automatically extracting relevant technical notes from the extensive Microsoft support database.