Service provider Accord first made contact with ProMet Engineers towards the end of 2006 when the mining consultants were looking for PC support and advice on their phone system.
The biggest IT challenge for Perth-based ProMet was keeping track of support cases for its then-50 staff.
The problem was to identify how many resources were required for IT support and system administration. "We had no idea of call volumes or trend analysis," says Brad Campbell, ProMet's IT manager.
Because support calls weren't tracked, the too-hard cases tended to disappear. "People would say two weeks later, 'what's going on?' and I would say, 'I don't know, I've got no track of it'," says Campbell.
The absence of performance indicators also meant the engineering firm had no way of evaluating the service provided by Accord or even knowing whether service level agreements were being met.
Accord was then relying on a combination of spreadsheets, a ticketing system and a database to keep track of customer support issues.
Campbell says the level of service provided by Accord before it switched to Kaseya "was probably suitable for the size of company it was then".
A merger with another service provider gave Accord the reason and motivation to try automation. A single tool to manage the customers of both companies would ease the transition, and also provide more detailed reporting for customers.
Accord trialled several automation platforms but few were able to scale from a two-PC business to an enterprise.
Tim Brewer, Accord's director of corporate services, says he was impressed by some enterprise tools but they didn't have the scalability the service provider needed to cope with 300 sites, each with its own VPN and sitting on different directory trees.
"We found other tools that could have done a 1200-seat site but all of a sudden you're using four or five platforms, you have to train staff on each one and you are making decisions to silo again."
Last year ProMet signed a contract with Accord as part of the move to a managed service.
"We brought on Kaseya as part of the business plan. That was moving from, 'We have a problem, we need support,' to being more proactive," says Brewer.
"It's easy to talk about how many tickets were provided, but when we moved to a fixed-fee contract or a managed-services contract, the focus went away from how many hours to what was the quality of the service being provided."
The contract marked a shift from the previous arrangement where Accord filled a contract role to provide a person on-site for support.
In practical terms Accord agreed to provide services backed by response times rather than a single tech's name.
"I don't think you need to be a large company to have a services contract. It has advantages at all levels and in a lot of ways it can be more cost effective because you're not having to rely on one IT person to resolve all your problems," says Campbell.
Campbell says the move has been "quite successful". "The most difficult issue has been educating the staff [that] they could get support by sending an email to a central email address or a specific number rather than phoning or emailing an individual."
When Accord took away the avenues for contacting the technician directly, some staff worried that service levels would drop.
Campbell describes it as a "small business mentality - [if] I've got a problem, I'll get out of my chair and find that person [or] pick up the telephone and they will come and see me. That was just an education program we went through and it was minimal impact."
To some extent the concerns were academic - Accord's decision to keep a tech at ProMet who would service other nearby customers in the Perth CBD meant the tech was around most days, and the level of service remained the same.
However, more of the daily support issues were managed remotely by Kaseya.
Using the automation platform has also avoided increasing the number of technicians to service a PC count which has gone from 80 to 130 in three years, says Brewer.
ProMet has sites on both sides of the Indian Ocean - two in Perth and one in South Africa. Previously Accord kept a list of all the Remote Desktop Protocol locations, but now the service provider can monitor a person's laptop and provide remote support on either continent.
User information is recorded in the platform and no longer tied to the tech on-site, which helps reduce the impact of staff turnover at the service provider.
The reporting function has improved customer relations by putting on record maintenance work which was otherwise invisible to the engineering firm.
"We were doing a lot of stuff that we weren't reporting back to the client. Patching systems, server uptime, disk cleanups, automating remediation, OS changes," says Brewer.
These tasks are ideally done by an automation tool and demonstrate its ability to save time.
A central system can use scripts or group policy changes to roll out changes across a customer's desktops, whether they are in one office or 10.
This translates to a huge saving on manpower that would otherwise be involved in manual roll-outs.
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