How to More Effectively Manage Your ASG Mobius ViewDirect Solution (without breaking your budget)
A number of analysts groups, including IDC, have been looking into the value of Managed Services. IDC in particular polled several hundred organizations, looking for the key business challenges that these organizations faced.
While each company polled had varying priorities, almost ALL stated one common challenge: their most valuable and knowledgeable technical people are too wrapped up in administering their systems, including their Enterprise Content Management, Output Management and Report Management. These companies expressed a need to free up these highly skilled and typically expensive resources to focus on more strategic corporate initiatives.
The next challenge these organizations face is how to manage their rapidly-growing infrastructure and reduce their associated costs. This equates to up and down time for IT services.
Those organizations using a Managed Services firm experienced much higher-quality IT services, with only 1.5 serious incidents per year. In comparison, the organizations managing their own systems described having a typical experience of 10 to 12 serious incidences per year, and unplanned downtime was costing these organizations upwards of $50K per hundred users annually in user productivity. If you are a larger organization with thousands of users, unplanned downtime is extremely costly on your user productivity - this is where Managed Services can help.
What is Managed Services and How Can It Help You?
In one sentence, Managed Services is a comprehensive end-to-end remote support administration for your systems, and in this case we are looking at Managed services for the ASG Mobius ViewDirect System (ViewDirect), including on-premise, cloud or hybrid deployments. Managed Services offers a single point-of-contact for all issues delivered by experienced, certified, and highly skilled engineers. Support, monitoring and administration - these are the key components to any complete managed services offering.
Managed Services is not meant to replace any of your team, but rather compliment them. For example, you may have a database administrator. This person might not necessarily know about the ViewDirect System, but they will know all about your database(s). A Managed Services provider is meant to work closely with this person to ensure your ViewDirect Application is operating the way it is supposed to and safeguard availability.
Using a Managed Services provider for your ASG Mobius ViewDirect solution improves customer service, as subject matter experts (SME) in all areas are available to address the needs of the company. With access to deeper skills and more resources, Managed Services provides you with the capabilities you need. Managed Service Providers tend to have a variety of customers, such that when a company wants to introduce a new technology, more than likely that Managed Services provider has done it somewhere else before and has the experience to work through any challenges. Most importantly, Managed Services can result in lower costs, as the company is able to find the appropriate balance of staffing and use their people exactly where they need them.
enChoice Is A Leading Managed Services Provider
enChoice has been providing mission-critical support through a helpdesk service to content services systems for over 25 years, and we now serve about 500 ECM customers worldwide, including several multinational clients. enChoice has a dedicated US based staff of engineers providing Mission Critical Support 24/7 with a one-hour response time. We have adopted a philosophy of hiring very senior and deeply skilled people - our average experience base in our team is over 15 years. Every one of our accounts has a defined primary and secondary support engineer, and their lot in life is to know you and know your system. Since 2003, we have averaged a 9.5 out of 10 customer satisfaction rating.
About five years ago enChoice made a significant investment in our entire infrastructure for service management, and we are now ITIL compliant (which is the industry standard). We pride ourselves on being very platform agnostic. We handle both ViewDirect for Networks (Nets) and MVS, so if your mainframe team is looking to retire or you can’t get a new team trained up quickly and cost effectively, enChoice can help to ensure your system continues to hum along.
If you are looking to access needed skills, improve customer service, mitigate new technology risks, and lower costs associated with your ASG Mobius ViewDirect system, contact enChoice for more information on Managed Services.
Michelle Christensen is the VP of ERM practice at enChoice
Michelle possesses a 25 + year track record in IBM software in the US and Worldwide, and is a certified MVS Systems programmer. Prior to enChoice, Michelle has served as the CMOD program manager and Worldwide sales leader for IBM ECM. She has been honored as an IBM Champion for her commitment to the IBM ECM and CMOD solutions, and Michelle is also a published author and recognize ECM Expert.