At Empalis, we have watched the IT market change enormously over the last ten years. Many companies outsourced part or all their IT operations, or even their entire infrastructure - or are currently doing so. Back then, until about five years ago, we were still talking about outsourcing, outtasking, hosting, Iaas, Saas. Today, it's all about devOps, microservices from the public cloud, the private cloud, or the hybrid cloud. However, the basic noise remains the same theme: data is leaving the enterprise partially or completely. Applications are partly or completely developed and operated outside the company in the hope of more flexibility, reliability, scaling and cost savings, while complying with high data protection requirements, data security and data protection requirements in general.
What drove us, as a company in the IT industry, to go through a digital transformation ourselves?
We wanted to continue to meet our customers' requirements in full. Consulting alone was no longer enough to achieve this. That's why we launched our own managed service about four years ago: Empalis Service Plus (ESPlus).
However, there were other, internal reasons that had pushed us to take this step:
The goal of expanding our business area, and thus achieving further growth.
The desire for an expanded business model, which, in addition to the consulting business, would enable us not only to retain our team, but to expand it - and to achieve a stability that paid off especially in pandemic times like now.
Voices from our own ranks who had repeatedly expressed the desire for opportunities to work remotely.
The challenge was great, because as a consulting company you are not immediately perceived in a completely new environment that plays by different rules. It also meant a culture issue for us in terms of customer service: In the consulting area, the customer has a fixed contact person who mainly supports him on site and accompanies him from the conception to the commissioning of the solution. This creates a very personal relationship between consultant and customer.
In a managed service, on the other hand, the consultant is usually not on site. One might think that communication takes place almost exclusively via tickets and that work is much more process-structured, automated, and digitalized using various systems, such as monitoring and reporting. The personal tends to get lost in the process. Nevertheless, it has extremely many advantages on both sides.
What are the advantages of a managed service?
- The model is more cost-effective than having your own in-house team for IT operations.
- In the event of downtime due to vacation, illness or pandemic, Managed Service offers real help.
- The service can be accurately measured against predefined SLAs.
- Managed Service leaves the in-house team more time for innovation.
- The customer's operations are distributed across an entire team of the Managed Service Partner.
Offering customers, a true value-add
Our aspiration for our managed service offering is to provide real value-add to the customer. By trying to apply everything we have learned and successfully applied in our consulting projects to our Empalis Service Plus model, attractive features and benefits emerged for our new business model of an "Empalis Service Plus" managed service:
- We realized that a modular structure offers different levels of flexibility and scaling of service, allowing the customer to choose what suits them as needed.
- As a result, we were able to build ongoing cost transparency through simple package structures.
- In addition, we created attractive "pay-per-use" licensing models and hardware appliances as optional add-ons.
- This setup enabled us to offer our customers flexible payment modalities up to monthly payments - a huge advantage for both sides.
With this model, our customers now effectively can optimize their operations in terms of performance and costs: through a solution-oriented approach, use of web-based, fully automated monitoring, reporting, and alerting services, use of best practices and clear documentation. Flexibly bookable service units - depending on requirements, which can also be used to modernize the IT / data protection landscape - generate major benefits.
Another strength of our model is the personal and individual service - moreover in German language. We continue to attach importance to providing our customers with fixed contact persons from among our highly qualified consultants, also in the Managed Service. Because it was clear to us that a good service is important, we have defined the above-mentioned conditions that ensure customers a simplified and fast solution to their concerns.
Vacation, sickness, and emergency situations are still the biggest challenges.
In fact, emergency situations are the biggest challenge in our customers' day-to-day business. We notice this not only in the managed service. In the consulting business, customers usually plan their projects, for example, for backup infrastructure upgrades, migrations, etc., with a decent lead time. But here, too, there are always situations where a consultant needs to be available at short notice, often "yesterday at best"! Other customers are also simply looking for a vacation or sickness replacement.
With our Empalis Service Plus model, we have given customers the greatest flexibility in choosing our SLAs. Customers can choose from simple consulting contingents that allow us to respond very quickly with emergency deployments - all the way up to "fully managed", which now includes 24-7 service.
Performance increase and cost optimization in the data protection area are the biggest, immediately measurable benefits for our customers.
At the beginning of every managed service project, it is very important to us to subject the customer environment to a health check-like analysis. The goal of our consultants is not only to increase the performance of daily backups in the customer's IT infrastructure through new, more modern data storage and backup concepts, but also to achieve cost savings through automation of our services and alternative, more flexible licensing models.
In this way, the customer also benefits in our Managed Service from the many years of experience in Data Protection of our service staff.
"Court Supplier" for Data Protection Services - Reliable and All-Round Service Provider for our Customers
It's been a long road from the first Empalis Service Plus Entry offerings to the first Empalis Service Plus Platinum customer. Nevertheless, it has been worthwhile on both sides to walk this path. We have become much more stable and are therefore well prepared for such economically critical times, as now caused by Corona.
With Empalis, our customers have an all-round service provider for data protection services that can now really offer an all-round package: We have positioned ourselves more strongly in the market, where we can answer today's needs beyond our previous offering of consulting and training - remote or in-house. Flexible pay-per-use licensing models, hardware appliances and managed 24-7 service complement our existing customer benefits, enabling us to take on the entire operation of small and medium-sized businesses through to enterprise customers. And we continue to ensure that customers have a dedicated point of contact for Managed Service as well. We will continue to make this promise a priority in the future.
