Manhattan may be the world capitol of take out, but when a toilet clogs? Forgettaboutit! The same applies to IT calls in New York, where any round-trip service routinely takes three hours.
“That’s the thing about traffic in New York. It always stinks,” says David Ulrich, regional director for NetGenIT (www.ivasion. com), a company that uses telephony to better manage its clients.
NetGenIT primarily services New York City and New Jersey. Stop-and-start traffic in the area can cause labor costs and gasoline bills to slowly mount–fees that normally get passed along to the customer in fuel surcharges, hourly rates, etc. By emphasizing remote monitoring and management, and treating its truck rolls as a last resort, NetGenIT can pass savings along to its clients in the form of flat monthly rates.
“Our phone is constantly ringing. If we had to send somebody out every single time, it would kill us,” Ulrich says.
He insists any cost efficiencies are the least of what NetGenIT realizes out of its partnership with Pandora Networks (www. pandoranetworks.com), a hosted communications company based in Emeryville, Calif.
“Pandora is the glue that pulls together our asset management,” Ulrich says. “It’s not how much they’ve saved us, but how much they’ve made us.”
When NetGenIT began looking for a new integrated suite of services, Ulrich says the company wanted to be able to run the entire operation remotely. NetGenIT offers its services to a variety of clients, including advertising and marketing agencies, medical management companies, and accounting firms.
The company’s services include unlimited technical support (onsite and remote), antivirus software, proactive health monitoring, and online data backup.
NetGenIT utilizes Pandora’s Worksmart, a subscription-based software and VoIP service aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. While remote management is nothing new, Ulrich says his company ultimately adopted Worksmart for its integration and affordability.
Beginning in June, NetGenIT adopted Worksmart as a single service rather than bidding out separate vendors for voice, video, messaging, and collaboration technologies.
“We looked at many systems to offer our phone-based support, and Worksmart was the most feature rich. Adopting it was a no-brainer because it fit our business model so closely,” Ulrich says.
Worksmart replaces up to 10 vendor products including telephone service, PBX hardware, conferencing hardware, instant messaging servers, collaboration servers, and contact-center services. It also has the ability to interface with third-party applications such as Salesforce.com’s On Demand CRM services through the Worksmart Worklet API interface.
A seamless customer experience remains a cornerstone of NetGenIT’s business model. The company bills itself as a “ remote IT department,” so automatic call distribution adds a personal touch to customer service.
When a computer or server goes kerplooey, Worksmart rings the customer through to its designated IT expert’s cell phone or PDA. Through Web access, the Salesforce.com feature ties the customer’s information into the technician’s laptop. Smartphones or calls routed directly to the laptop are also an option.
“The beauty of this system is its flexibility. If they are across town sitting in a Starbucks with WiFi, they can help the customer,” says Ulrich, adding that NetGen is upgrading all its laptops to Cingular wireless cards (a tradeoff in total bandwidth for wider network coverage).
NetGenIT’s technicians include network administrators, CTOs, CIOs, network engineers, system engineers, security engineers, and Web and application developers. The company has grown its markets outside of New York City into California and Texas.
“We contract out the nuts and bolts onsite work,” Ulrich says. “The rest is virtual.”
Worksmart is sold as a hosted service or as a premise-based service. Both are managed from Pandora’s fault-tolerant data centers.
“Pandora’s capabilities are our magic secret sauce,” says Ulrich. “Its telephony and integration give our sales force better capabilities and a cutting edge.”
NetGenIT’s underlying application servers operate on Linux, with desktop support on Windows 98/200/XP and any standard SIP IP phone or SIP compatible device.
There’s no software or proprietary switch to buy, and open-standards phones and PCs cut migration costs. Pandora Networks takes care of technical support, peak-load capacity, and software upgrades, as well as hidden costs like night and weekend support, security management, and archiving. V
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