Channel Pro - February 2009

PARTNER
ROAN SOLUTIONS INC.
SPOTLIGHT

PROFILE CRAIG RAUBENHEIMER CEO

History: In business since

1997

Focus: Providing managed

services and IT consulting

solutions

Core Value: Building

customer trust through

solid technical delivery

and honest, open

communication

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Being a trusted partner to your clients means

finding trusted partners of your own

February 2009

Roan Solutions has been offering managed services

since before the term even existed.

It’s true. We’ve been offering our customers fixed-

price IT outsourcing packages since way back in 2000.

We even called them our gold, silver, and bronze plans,

as so many MSPs do today.

Back then, of course, the technology to support

customers remotely barely existed, so we delivered

most of our services on site. But the important thing

from our perspective was offering all-inclusive, flat

monthly rates instead of transaction-based, break-fix

pricing. That allowed us to serve our clients as trusted

IT advisors rather than glorified repair people. Building

that kind of ongoing relationship with our customers

has been a key to our success over the years.

Trusted Partners

As it happens, we also seek to forge trust-based relationships with our business partners. The reasoning behind that is pretty simple. These days, we deliver most of our managed services offsite, and we rely on strategic partners to make that possible. Our ability to serve our clients is ultimately only as strong as the tools and services those strategic partners provide. If they aren’t trusted advisors to us, we can’t be trusted advisors to our customers.

So what makes for a trustworthy partner? We look for the same qualities in our partners that we strive to achieve ourselves. They need to have outstanding business processes and a rock-solid infrastructure. Above

all, though, they need to understand the SMB marketplace as well as we do, or better, and be capable of suggesting great new ideas for products and services based on that deep customer insight.

A Strategic Relationship

Zenith Infotech, one of our most strategic partners, is a company with all three of those essential attributes. For starters, their back-end infrastructure processes are excellent and their technologies are extremely reliable. Even better, though, they understand what customers are looking for in managed services, and they consistently come up with new offerings to meet those needs.

Take their Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution, for example. It’s secure, fully-automated, and priced affordably for SMBs. As a result, we’ve found it exceptionally easy—and profitable—to sell.

Plus, it requires little support from our technicians and no additional infrastructure at my facilities, so it enables me to grow my business without adding staff. Same goes for Zenith’s NOC services. I could build a NOC on my own, of course, but it would cost an enormous amount of time and money. Tapping into Zenith’s NOC allows me to scale my business to a point that would be impossible on my own. I’m able to do more with less.