World of possibility

Darren Baguley

Break/fix is a tough way to make a living.

Clients only call you when there’s something wrong, they want it fixed yesterday and they take their sweet time paying the bill.

You’re lucky if gross margins get to 20 percent and the only way you can grow your business is by increasing the number of chargeable hours you’re billing – which means you either don’t have a life or you hire more people.

The first option is only sustainable for so long and the second is a great idea unless your business happens to be operating in a state where there’s a mining boom on and burger flippers in McDonald’s are earning more than teachers.

This was exactly the situation Information Security Group (ISG) CIO, Matt Lansdown, found four years ago when he joined the company.

ISG is a desktop and network management support company that also provides consultancy services, hardware and software support, IT procurement, installation, security, connectivity and remote access capability.

With a large client base spread all over Western Australia, ISG is a “multi-million dollar company” which employs eight people and works extensively with contractors and other business partners.

ISG was founded by Mike Travis in 1997 and when Lansdown joined in 2003 he saw that it was able to make ends meet but that was about it.

“With my business partner, I was an on-the-ground technician four years ago and we were running from place to place just making ends meet, just enough to pay the bills,” Lansdown said.

He and Travis decided that things had to change and they started to look around for new directions to take their business.

“We were looking to better use the staff we had and to establish a recurring revenue stream,” said Lansdown. “We needed cash to do infrastructure but didn’t have enough to do it from our break/fix model. And we wanted to build out infrastructure to overcome the traditional problem of a small business – cash flow.”

The answer for ISG lay in what was then a relatively untried IT automation vendor with a funny name, Kaseya.

At the time Kaseya managed Australia out of Singapore but Lansdown and Travis decided to take a chance and became one of Kaseya’s earliest adopters ‘Down Under.’

Once the decision had been made to start rolling out the technology to ISG’s clients – at its most basic, Kaseya enables remote monitoring and management of IT infrastructure – the actual implementation was straightforward, said Lansdown.

“We were already using a combination of VPNs, on site visits, RDP clients to access sites if we needed to do anything remotely but usually we’d just drive out there. So when we first brought Kaseya in, we just thought we’ve got this piece of software that allows us to put an agent on and use it as a remote control device.”

ISG’s technician started off using Kaseya to do exactly that but quickly realised that they were only scratching the surface of what the application was capable of.

“For a little while we used just it to remotely access our client base, but then we thought this is just garbage and started to do some reading,” said Lansdown.

Once they felt they had a better understanding of what the software could do, Lansdown and his technicians established disk monitoring and put some patch management in place.

The next step after that was to sell the whole concept of managed services to ISG’s clients and put service level agreements (SLAs) and contracts in place.

“We went to our clients with a proposal that incorporated all the best features of what other companies were doing with Kaseya in the US and elsewhere,” said Lansdown.

Technicians can sometimes be a bit conservative when it comes to changes in the way they actually do their work but once they started to see the possibilities offered by Kaseya, ISG’s staff embraced the new technology wholeheartedly.

“Being nerdy types – ISG only employs nerds with personality – most embraced it pretty much straight away,” said Lansdown.

With the transition to the new model well underway, ISG started to see immediate benefits including a massive jump in productivity.

“Without adding monitoring, patching, security or anything like that, just from being able to bring up a console with all the managed machines and access any machine remotely, we got a huge jump in productivity,” said Lansdown.

“And it certainly beats having to get in the car and drive for hours or even days just to do one mouse click.”

ISG quickly established a Network Support Centre (NSC) for its managed clients and rotates its technicians between it, going on site and working with the clients who don’t want to move the MSP model. And the benefits to the company became immediately apparent.

“The way we’ve streamlined our workflow with Kaseya, we have one-and-a-half technicians per day in the NSC to manage around 1400 machines – desktops, laptops and servers – and it averages 30 calls a day inbound and 15 of those are nuisance calls such as caps lock on,” said Lansdown.

Apart from the jump in productivity, ISG has seen some other major benefits from the implementation of Kaseya.

“Customer satisfaction has gone through the roof because they’re calling into our NSC and they’re getting a response straight away,” said Lansdown.

Indeed, 85 percent of the time a technician can access the machine remotely and fix whatever the issue is, and if it’s not in that 85 percent it’s usually fixed within half an hour.

The flexibility of this mode of operation is helping to safeguard ISG against the worst effects of the skills shortage Western Australia is currently experiencing.

“It’s well nigh impossible to get someone new these days – you’re getting either someone who is enterprise level who you know just wants a job and won’t hang around or you’re getting a graduate straight out of college who will maybe be good in the long term. But to get a mid-level jack-of-all-trades-type technician is all but impossible,” said Lansdown.

“Because of our growth we’re moving premises and some of the guys are going to be 50 kilometres away from the new office. This has presented some challenges from a retention perspective but we’ve worked out they’ll be able to work Kaseya from home using VoIP. Kaseya is web-based so remote workers just log into the web server and calls coming into the help desk will be routed to the technician’s soft phone.”

There are also strong financial benefits to the technology, said Lansdown.

“We started with Kaseya four years ago and the business grew 50 percent in the first year and doubled every year after that.”

And the income stream is regular as well, he said.

“Kaseya helps put money in the bank every month; we’ve got a certain number of clients signed up so we know that at the start of every month that amount of money is going to be in the bank.”

Kaseya also acts as an anchor for ISG’s client base.

“The whole purpose of implementing Kaseya was to grow our client base and once you’ve got them under control – monitoring of desktops, control of backups and security – it really makes the client think twice before saying ‘you cost too much’ and pulling the plug. Having Kaseya in place means the client will at least come and talk to you first.”

While the implementation of Kaseya went more smoothly than most, Lansdown does admit there were some challenges, especially in the early years.

“We definitely went through the pain of being an infant product,” he said.

“There were a lot of late night phone calls to the US, long calls to Martin Ashby in Singapore but we were lucky we were small enough at the time to be able to take the time to work through where we wanted to be. So if we made a mistake we could take a step back and say ‘that didn’t work’ and move forward again. I would do it that way again. Start small and work my way up. We still only use 50 percent of the capability the system’s got and one of my jobs is to develop new ways of doing things and sell it to the technical team.”

Besides further development of the Kaseya product, ISG has ambitious plans for the future. Lansdown would like to see the business double again, but as it has been doubling for the past three years he realises it may be a big ask, so his main focus will be customer service.

“Now that we’ve got the managed service model in place, what our business is missing is traditional face-to-face customer service, someone walking in the door saying hi, how are the kids etc. So that’s what we’re working on now, we’ll have the technicians going out on site, saying hi to key stakeholders, cover points of pain with them and move onto the next one. Relationship managers as well as technical types and that’s the advantage of having nerds with personality.”