Systems integrator CCNA (short for Converged Communication Network Applications) delivers technology solutions and services to government, enterprise and carrier customers typically having between 200 and 30,000 seats.
The company’s roster of products includes contact centre, data, network, data centre, and unified communication solutions. These utilise a host of services spanning customer experience, storage, network, unified communications, security and cloud capabilities.
“When customers are looking to do something that has some business smarts to it,” managing director Craig Sims explains, “we are generally involved.”
“A lot of the work we do is based around customer contact, and we’re making sure that our clients are communicating at the right levels, in the right way.”
In recent years, widespread adoption of cloud-based services has accelerated the pace of change and forced firms like CCNA to expand their offerings with advanced capabilities in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and analytics.
These capabilities are proving immensely popular with service-based organisations that are, as Gartner found in its 2020 Agenda Poll, wrestling with the challenges of delivering a quality customer service experience, prioritising digital investment, and implementing technology and process transitions.
Several years ago, growing customer demand for such capabilities led CCNA to add LogMeIn to its roster of vendor partners.
CCNA initially began working with LogMeIn to deliver its customers the benefits of online meeting tools like LogMeIn GoToMeeting, which CCNA has used both internally and for its customers.
Since then, CCNA has integrated a range of LogMeIn products into its own customer solutions with great success.
Faster, easier, and more responsive
The cloud-based nature of LogMeIn’s offerings has made them much faster and easier to implement than conventional on-premises solutions.
It has also enabled commissioning of trial applications so quickly CCNA’s presales consultants can onboard a potential customer for a free LogMeIn trial before the planning meeting is over.
“Deals move a lot quicker than in the past, and one of the great things about the LogMeIn products is the ability to trial and demo all of their products very quickly," Sims says.
“We can set them up in a meeting, then they can go away to have a play with it and come back to ask us any questions that come up.”
Faster turnaround speed has enabled CCNA to be more responsive to customer tenders – giving it an advantage compared to less nimble competitors.
That speed has also proven helpful in urgent situations, where customers often need remote-access urgently and CCNA “can have LogMeIn installed in half an hour”, Sims says.
Other companies need to be able to adjust their resource usage based on seasonal fluctuations in demand and usage – something that has been easy with the cloud-based LogMeIn tools and their web-based management console.
Customers can log in at any time to monitor their usage of the LogMeIn services, commissioning and decommissioning users as needed and comparing their license expenses with actual usage.
“A lot of customers don’t want to be paying a big capex up front,” Sims explains, “because they take a long time to utilise that investment.
This is why they are leaning toward pay as you go solutions that are hosted in the cloud, and can scale up and down as they want to. They’re no longer flying blind with an on-premises solution.”
A partner for growth
As well as enabling CCNA to be more responsive to customer requirements, partnering with LogMeIn has helped the company deliver richer solutions by integrating capabilities such as GoToConnect for unified communications, and LastPass for password security.
Larger enterprises are particularly concerned about potential exposure from compromised credentials, Sims says, and this makes LogMeIn’s Identity & Access Management products particularly relevant to their needs.
“Most of our sales around IAM tools come from consulting with the customer, finding out where they’ve got holes, and what they need,” Sims explains. “By tapping LogMeIn, we can provide them with the right solution.”
As a strategic partner for CCNA’s greater investment in cloud-based services, LogMeIn has been proactive and available to the integrator as its specialists engage with all kinds of customers.
“As a company LogMeIn is growing quite quickly, and they have more and more people on the ground to support their products,” Sims says.
That said, he adds, CCNA staff rarely need to tap into LogMeIn’s 24/7 support network: “We have our regular contacts and we have an escalation path if need be, but we very rarely need to use any of that,” he says.
Just like CCNA, LogMeIn is a company “that is going places”, Sims says.
“Their management team is very interactive, open, and willing to work with us – and they’re very flexible and willing to jump in to resolve things.”
“Our relationship with LogMeIn is growing quite quickly, and it’s all on the back of how easy it is to work with them.”
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