The Service Provider global resourcing challenge means never having to say you’re sorry
by
Matthew Diller, Service Provider Specialist at Viadex Global
VARs, SIs, CSPs, and Telcos compete on more than the superiority, breadth and depth of services, customer service excellence and reputation. Painstakingly developed and curated, these are the differentiating factors you can control. It’s your choice how you develop them further, through your business growth strategy, efforts, and in-house skills. You can anticipate risk, and develop contingencies to deal with it.
Wherever there’s investment risk you can mitigate it; as trends become clear, you can respond to them where appropriate. When new customer demands emerge, you can align your services to meet them. Even as COVID drove a revolution in remote working for your customers, the technology solutions you provide were aligned to the new norm.
When it’s your known infrastructure and environment, you can assess and mitigate risk. This blog is about the unknowns; the elements of risk you can’t govern for, that can come from places or external suppliers having their own problems or limitations of which you had no forewarning.
Ground control
The opposite of ‘risk’ is ‘certainty’. It’s about knowing that the agility you offer as a service provider is matched and complemented by the agility of any organisation you turn to when deploying new services that require new equipment, or managed services, in particular territories.
Certainty is about being 100% assured that you can offer continuity of service to new customers or meet the growth requirements of existing customers. It means never having to say you’re sorry that you let them down.
The key to certainty is trust; confidence that the partner you choose to procure, configure, install and implement hardware—servers, storage, and networking components (from cabling to routers, and modems to switches)—has global experience and a track record in serving companies just like yours. In other words, you can trust them to get the job done, no matter what.
What does ‘getting the job done’ really mean? When it comes to global projects, the ‘job’ may be well defined, specifications precise, costs fixed, and deadlines immovable. When all goes well, all these parameters are met, but the world is a diverse place and everything we know to be true here is not necessarily true in Mexico, Asia, Africa, or further-flung and lesser-known places. Laws differ, so do customs requirements, bureaucratic procedures, and even vendor capabilities in reaching these places; getting the right equipment to the right place at the right time.
During the pandemic, Viadex helped to keep service providers operating, enabling ‘business as usual’ in far from usual circumstances. We delivered nearly 3,000 global projects across more than 30 countries.
That’s when restrictions made global supply chain activity difficult. Now that matters are settled back to normal, or at least settling back, our approach—tested to the limit in harsher times—is agile on steroids. Our global deployment map shows where we operate. Beyond the sheer practicalities of the IT deployment projects involved, we also provide managed services for Service Providers’ infrastructures, right up to the application layer.
Rely on a Secure Global IT Supply Chain
My role at Viadex—we have a 20-year+ track record in global project deployment, and providing business services, for geo-dispersed customers—is to help Service Providers in sourcing hardware of any description, adopting advantageous commercial approaches for their projects, negotiating in their best interests, and providing the essential link with vendors to make sure of their responsiveness, cooperation, and support.
We have experts around the globe, in-country, both through partnerships and our own extensive network of local specialists. They provide a variety of disciplines around expediting global projects in countries where you may not have an in-country presence or the requisite skills.
More than that though, everyone at Viadex takes what we do personally.
I’m called at odd ‘out-of-hours’ times by customers, sometimes due to time-zone variations but often because they seek reassurance at any time. I’m always there for them. The whole Viadex team is. This is because we don’t consider ourselves a ‘corporate’; our approach is to offer a boutique service.
The extra thousands of miles
Our ethos is not to go the extra mile, but to go the extra thousands of miles in resolving issues. If there’s a problem with customs clearance, we’re as likely to send somebody to the airport or docks to sort it out as we are to make a phone call. This is what agile is; not resting until the job’s done. This is what trust is; customers know they can rely on us to deal with any unexpected situation and still meet the deadlines. We quash the risk to provide the certainty.
Safer Business Together
I’ve focused on supply chain risks, an area where you may not be able to foresee the pitfalls, complications, and sheer weight of unfamiliar detail required. Of course, the other big risk worry in a digital world is one that every service provider is affected by; the risk of cyber-attack. If that happens, everything you’ve built up comes under threat—not just your data, your customers’ data, and your ability to operate, but also your reputation.
Through our partnership with Secureworks® we provide the experience, resources, and toolsets that Service Providers can turn to for all-round reassurance, and end-to-end vigilance, protection and – when threat events emerge – remediation in real-time. We call it Safer Business Together. We help companies to understand where their cyber-security posture can be improved; a holistic approach that ensures no gaps are left anywhere in your infrastructure or your IT edge.
Managed services
Lastly, we also offer support across your entire IT environment through our 24/7/365 Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), IaaS, DRaaS, Monitoring as a Service, Hosting/Colo Managed Services, and Network Management. Here’s a snapshot:
If you want to know a little more about how Viadex can help you to treat the world as if it were on your doorstep, and remove risk from the global growth challenge, just email me and we can have a chat: matthew.diller@viadex.com
