Contracts in a Geo-Dispersed business

Author:  Dominic McQuade

Managing a geo-dispersed IT footprint is challenging in many ways. Core to performance and consistency starts with developing and implementing a global price catalogue which on it’s own becomes both essential as well as a challenging undertaking for many businesses. For our client, an entity trading in the manufacturing industry and based across multiple countries, this was precisely what they needed but did not have the capacity or skillset to be able to deliver.

Operating at a group level with regional entities below that, the starting point was for their Group IT needed each entity to have a Viadex Firewall as a Service (FWAAS) contract, to manage and standardise the firewall stack across all companies in the group. They wanted a single group-level contract to act as the single version of the truth, but because budgets were localised they needed billing to occur in local currency for each regional entity, which would also deliver the tax advantages to each local business.

Specific challenges to standardisation across the company included:

• a myriad of firewall vendors, 
• various states of support for hardware,
• an inconsistent or out-of-control rule base.

Our client also did not wish to onboard multiple vendors in each region, nor hire firewall and network specialists.  A core requirement was to have a single point of contact that would deliver solutions under a single project contract.

As a solution, Viadex developed a global price catalogue for the client that they could use internally across their constituent operating companies. By treating a parent contract as the main source of truth we were able to apply competitive pricing for the client, rather than using 8 or 9 different contracts. The client benefited from a scaling service and fixed price book – as a result of the systems we implemented, each OpCo could reach out directly to the Viadex Project Manager and consume the FWASS service knowing exactly what they would get and the price point they would pay on a monthly basis. Furthermore, each amendment addition was co-termed with the parent contract, therefore, allowing for a single negotiation to be carried out at renewal. 

Through our partnership, we have enabled our client to focus purely on business growth and expansion; knowing they have a trusted and competent partner to manage their firewall connectivity whilst keeping an eye on vulnerabilities and security patches. 

We provided our client with the opportunity to standardise on a manufacturer, as well as ship/import and export globally. This gives the client the best pricing possible rather than purchasing individual SKUs.

This is an excellent example of Viadex operating globally to assist our clients. We are taking the lessons learned from this FWASS contract and extending them to our other managed service offerings available. The next item set for scaling is Managed Network, which sits behind FWASS and covers all client switches and access points.