Channel Pro - September 2009

say the value of a truly great strategic partnership is incalculable. However, in my own case, I can tell you exactly what a great partnership is worth, because helping clients find the right managed services partner enabled DedicatedIT to grow managed services revenue by 1,000 percent in about a year’s time.

I’ve always placed a high value on partnerships. In fact, I can’t imagine doing business without them. If I were a dry cleaner, I’d probably be handing out my cards to restaurant owners, so they could pass them along to customers who spilled food on themselves!

I apply that same kind of thinking to my business every day. For example, I have relationships with numerous technology firms, but I also partner with copier companies, telephone companies, and Internet providers. They point their clients to us, and we point ours to them. Everyone wins. Zenith’s software on a trial basis with one of our clients.

We got an alert informing us that the memory on one of their Exchange servers was poorly configured. Our old system sometimes had trouble telling if a server was up or down, but Zenith’s tool was drilling down into details!

Many of my peers had glowing things to say about Zenith, so we decided to give them a try.Very quickly we saw that we didn't have the time or development expertise on staff to match what Zenith gave us right out of the box. It probably would have taken us a year of adding custom monitoring sets to our old system just to get close.

“Many people

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Trust Your Gut

However, you’ve got to have the right partners to achieve results like that. We look for companies that value customer service as much as we do and that have the flexibility to make smart decisions on the fly rather than slavishly sticking to standard operating procedures. And above all, we look for companies that deliver on their promises.

Selecting partners is more art than science. You can study a company’s financials and market position and Web site all you want. Ultimately, gut instinct is what counts. One of my employees sums up, very nicely, the key question we ask about potential partners: Do they walk like us and talk like us? Often, we find the answer in little things, like how fast they reply to emails. We get back to people pretty quickly around here. A company much slower in replying probably wouldn’t make a good partner for us.

Best Practices

Zenith Infotech, on the other hand, passed all of our partnering tests with flying colors. We went to them about a year ago while we were still using another vendor’s managed services tool. Extending it to do everything we needed it to was eating up a lot of our time. In addition, no matter how much customization we performed, we still had clients phoning in network problems that our system hadn’t detected. It was embarrassing—and dangerous to our long-term health.

Many of my peers had glowing things to say about Zenith, so we decided to give them a try. Very quickly we saw that we didn't have the time or development expertise on staff to match what Zenith gave us right out of the box. It probably would have taken us a year of adding custom monitoring sets to our old system just to get close.

The real “ah-ha” moment came when we were using

Tenfold Revenue Growth Best of all, Zenith’s products enable me to scale up my customer base without scaling up my payroll. I have half as many employees today as I did before switching to Zenith. Despite that, we’ve grown our revenue by a factor of 10. It shows what’s possible when you spend your time helping clients rather than fiddling with your managed services system.