Take a flexible approach to buying managed IT services

Managed service providers offer a fundamentally appealing quality to clients: “We don’t get sick, we don’t go on vacation, we don’t go to sleep,” said Jason Waldrop, the president of Red River Managed Services. He added, “You can grow us or shrink us on demand. That’s one of the primary values we bring.”

Waldrop said federal agency clients are moving towards a shared usage model similar to that which is common in commercial IT. In that model, clients choose a set of what Waldrop called curated services to offload to a provider. It’s more selective than the more expensive, but less flexible model of simply outsourcing network operations.

Red River provides “a mix of folks who wake up and do dedicated things for that client,” Waldrop said. “Let’s say, manage backup as a service, or unified communications as a service. We think it’ll ultimately make its way into more broad-based end user services and monitoring management services.”

For an example, Waldrop cited new employee provisioning, especially in the age of telework and remote work.

“A lot of times, the user’s first experience is opening the laptop they get from FedEx in their driveway from their company,” Waldrop. “For a lot of our clients, we make sure that out-of-box experience is really, really clean and frictionless; that the user opens that laptop, and it’s got all the applications they need. And they can get right to work.”

A fast-emerging, related managed service, Waldrop said, stems from the combination of greater numbers of remote employees and agencies’ growing use of commercial cloud computing. Specifically, more clients seek identity management as a service. That’s because multiple cloud providers and multiple user personas combine to form a complex requirement.

“Having a suite of curated identity-based services that allow this remote work in the cloud – managed service providers deliver that every day to federal agencies and commercial customers,” Waldrop said.

Whose tools anyhow?

Use of managed services sparks questions concerning software tools, Waldrop said. Sometimes clients already have paid-for suites of tools they need personnel augmentation to operate. Sometimes a client will prefer to have the managed service producer use its own tools. Here again, flexibility is key.

“It works both ways,” Waldrop said. “Sometimes a customer comes to us and says, ‘Look, we just need help.’” In such cases “we have a suite of curated services, everything from automated backups to anti-malware to identity management, you name it; things that everybody needs.” The client will often “take the one off the mannequin,” Waldrop said; that is, hire the service provider to apply its, the provider’s, tools.

In other cases, “they don’t want to use, at least initially, any of our tools,” Waldrop said. “They want our expertise, our processes, access to our service delivery strategies. But they want us to come in and leverage the tool sets that they’ve already invested in.”

Waldrop said cases like that call for a collaborative process through the contract negotiation “where we say, okay, we agree on a suite of service level agreements to deliver that service” to end users.

The quality of end user self- service managed by providers has started to improve thanks to artificial intelligence, Waldrop added.

“Think about what we can do from a tier zero and tier one support” standpoint, Waldrop said, citing common issues like disabled printing, non-functional smart phones, or glitches in enterprise applications that invoke help desk calls. “Well, AI chatbots can allow that end user to self-service in natural language, ‘hey, I’m having trouble printing.’” Algorithms will call up a specific article from a knowledge base and deliver it directly to the user, he said. The organization can avoid the cost and complexity of maintaining its own intrant.

“Now, users don’t have to get on the phone, talk to an agent,” Waldrop said. “They just get their problem solved through AI in that manner.”

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