NOC, NOC, who’s there?

It’s a tough choice to make for any reseller. When your business is humming along nicely and there’s a little extra cash in the kitty, maybe it’s time to consider expanding into new areas. If it goes nowhere, there’s some lost capital and gained embarrassment to suffer through. But if it’s a hit, it could be the beginning of a healthy new source of profit.

Klikon Solutions found itself in this position a year ago and decided to try out the newest fad, managed services. But instead of rebadging one of the big telcos’ products, the 37-staff integrator was considering doing it in-house. Klikon had been experimenting with remote monitoring shareware and providing band-aid solutions to its customers, whom it had quizzed about their most pressing needs.

A common theme was network blindness – customers knew nothing about their IT infrastructure’s capacity until it had exceeded it.

“The [customers’] biggest pain point was that they had absolutely no visibility of their network, so everything they did was reactive. Someone’s Citrix server was almost at capacity, or the print server had run out of disk space. [IT staff would] get a call from the general manager who’d say, ‘what’s happened with the network, why’s it gone down, IT’s stuffed, heads are going to roll,’” said David Abouhaidar, Klikon’s director.

Some customers had isolated monitoring software, such as proprietary programs attached to HP or IBM servers, but no cohesive approach.

“We wanted to provide an A to Z solution for these guys. We saw an opportunity there.”

In January 2007, Klikon undertook a serious evaluation of the “Rolls Royces” of network operations centres (NOCs), and judged them on their ability to meet their customers’ desire for network visibility.

IBM’s Tivoli, HP’s OpenView and CA’s Unison were put through their paces; Klikon went with a $1.5 million (retail price) CA solution.

Abouhaidar said one reason behind the decision was the quality and ease of use of the software. The Unison “was far superior [to] the other two”. CA’s eHealth product “was just one of the most phenomenal reporting and live time monitoring pieces of software that the guys had ever seen.”

The second factor was CA sales which Abouhaidar said were “absolutely fantastic”. “They really walked us through it, answered nearly every single one of our questions, and went down to the absolute mechanics of the application. We just felt much more confident with their product.”

After a couple of months learning the ropes of the NOC and seven months in the field, Abouhaidar said that managed services is clearly the most profitable in the Klikon stable, which includes infrastructure solutions and information security.

Klikon found a customer who was “more than happy” to play the guinea pig, and provided the training experience for Klikon’s staff. There are now 12 companies using managed services - all existing customers - representing 10 percent of the customer base, which includes health care, tier-two finance and legal, up to 2000 seats. The FY09 target is to stretch that to 60 percent.

Klikon is adding yet another arrow to their quiver, this time a little ahead of the pack: Green IT. The reseller has just completed its first job doing a green server room, with water-cooling racks and other energy efficient options ticked.

Abouhaidar admits there is a good margin in Green IT as the gear is still expensive, although prices are dropping. However, the entry requirements will ensure that not every reseller will jump on the bandwagon.

“The green concept is really starting to take off, I think that’s still going to be the next wave. [However] I don’t envisage every reseller under the sun doing the same thing; you’ve really got to have that certification in place.”

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