Computer Network Support for Medium-size Companies

Progent's co-sourcing services allow your business to find the right balance between in-house and outside support by leveraging the capability of your in-house IT staff with the in-depth expertise of Progent's engineers. By delivering effective support when you need it, providing specialists for critical applications, minimizing travel costs through remote support, offering unique services such as customized, automated server monitoring, and charging only for the services you use, Progent gives you an affordable way to maximize the business value of your network.

Why Progent Makes Sense for Mid-size Businesses
Progent's staff of certified IT professionals have extensive experience with enterprise networks, allowing mid-size businesses to achieve world-class IT support without having to maintain large internal IT organizations or absorb the high cost of outsourcing network support to large national service organizations.

Working with Progent allows your mid-size business to:

• Avoid Turning IT Management Into Crisis Management
  Companies with 100 to 250 network clients often have sophisticated, enterprise-class IT infrastructures, but rarely have internal IT staffs with the depth and breadth of technical expertise to provide all the IT support that complex networks require. Internal resources are often overworked and budgetary realities do not permit hiring additional full-time IT staff.

  These environments can be subject to higher than average employee turnover, which often leads to situations where replacement support staff must focus on keeping the network running rather than enhancing it. Lacking in knowledge of the history, design, implementation, and architecture of the network, and with little time available between crises, new support staff are unlikely to be able to plan and implement effective network upgrades or migrate the system to keep up with changing business requirements.

• Let Senior Management Focus on Business, Not Network Hassles
  Many mid-size businesses are aggressively moving to outsourced support models for information technology because building up large internal IT staffs seldom pays off with strategic business advantages. Attempting to handle all IT service issues in-house can bog down senior management with the details of IT problems, yielding poor returns for time invested by such top talent.

  Companies need reliable, feature-rich, secure, and fault-tolerant IT environments to support their mission critical applications, but they recognize that it makes little business sense to own and build such systems themselves or to manage large internal staffs of IT personnel. Smart outsourcing or co-sourcing allows companies to concentrate their internal resources on areas that will bring them the greatest strategic and competitive advantages in the markets they serve.

• Migrate Quickly to the Best Network Technology
  Periodic economic downswings have caused many IT environments to become woefully out of date as a result of IT budgets being slashed during a crisis but not adequately restored during a recovery. The starvation diets forced upon many business networks has created a burden of outdated information systems. This problem becomes apparent when the demand for new applications and customer-centric IT solutions can't be easily supported on legacy systems. Out-of-date technologies also make it difficult to benefit from modern computing paradigms such as hydrid models that combine public clouds with local datacenters.

  Increasingly, companies are being challenged by upstart competitors who are not saddled with legacy environments and can quickly introduce state-of-the-art, customer-friendly applications such as web-based eCommerce, vender extranets, customer portals, BYOD, and unified communications. Often such major initiatives can't be carried out solely with existing resources. Adding to full-time head count seldom makes long-term economic sense for project-specific work, and companies typically don't have the time to bring resources up to speed for business-critical projects. In these circumstances, it can be very cost effective to engage outsourced resources that can solve problems immediately and transfer knowledge efficiently.

The scope and depth of Progent's engineering staff bring a unique set of benefits to companies wishing to increase the business value of their IT system within a realistic budget. These benefits include:

• Best Practices
  Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average longer than ten years of real-world industry background, in the trenches of network service, performing a wide variety of IT tasks for an extensive mix of businesses. Every Progent support professional shares a proven collection of leading practices which are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its support staff. This ensures that you get not only expert IT help, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for applying technical knowledge to resolve actual network problems efficiently. Find out more about Progent's best practices for network consulting.

• Value Pricing
  Progent's pricing policy is to charge for online support and in-person visits by the minute. Consequently, you pay just for delivered support. Progent does not demand a more expensive rate for urgent service, and Progent does not bill for travel except for emergency calls where on-site work is less than four hours. In addition, Progent applies no service activation fee and asks no monthly commitment for services provided during regular business hours. Many support organizations impose large minimum fees or charge in increments of fifteen minutes or longer. Progent's one-minute pricing granularity avoids huge bills for fast solutions so you won't be tempted to allow less critical problems to fester until they grow into major ones. Find out more about Progent's value pricing for IT outsourcing.

• Full Documentation of IT Services
  Progent has created a comprehensive support reporting system that stores and formats detailed documentation for all delivered support activities. Unlike many independent consultants or small support firms who provide scant documentation or details of tasks performed, every service provided by Progent is accompanied by comprehensive documentation. Every Progent staff member has access to the support documentation sent by each consultant to each customer. The discipline of documenting and organizing support activity allows more effective service and eliminates a variety of common problems such as when a service client is virtually held hostage to a consultant who refuses to release vital service information. Find out more about Progent's documentation of IT outsourcing services.

• Knowledge Transfer
  Progent practices information transfer from Progent's support experts to clients. By teaching customers to handle problems that are within their comfort zone, Progent is able to concentrate on delivering hard-to-find services where Progent faces little competition. Small companies who work with familiar independent service providers or who maintain internal IT personnel benefit when Progent passes on knowledge about critical technology and tested processes to make their networks more robust, protected, and efficient. Find out more about Progent's knowledge transfer services.

Security Services
Progent offers a wide range of network security services to help businesses to identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities, defend against attacks, and recover from successful penetrations. Progent can provide remote and on-premises security consulting and also has developed economical fixed-cost security evaluation packages to complement Progent's regular by-the-minute billing. Progent's security assessment packages provide businesses with an economical way to comply with security standards mandated by state regulators or by customers.

Hosting Services
Progent's application hosting services offer a secure, affordable, and hassle-free alternative for managing mission-critical applications by combining the dependability of a world-class data center with the expertise of Progent's Microsoft-certified support team. Progent's Private Cloud Hosting Service gives midsize businesses a cost-effective option for hosting a variety of software platforms and key applications in a secure, fault-tolerant data center on a high-performance virtual host configured and maintained by Progent's network support experts.

Hybrid Cloud Integration Services
Progent can provide advanced online consulting to help businesses integrate their networks with public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Progent can assist organizations of all sizes to design and administer cost-effective environments that support Windows and Linux operating systems and apps in both cloud-based systems and in hybrid network models that utilize on-premises resources along with public clouds. To help you efficiently incorporate public cloud computing services into your IT ecosystem, Progent offers a variety of cloud integration services such as Office 365 integration with on-premises Exchange, Microsoft Azure planning and integration, Amazon AWS migration and support, and Amazon Web Marketing Service (WMS) development and troubleshooting. Progent has more than 20 years of experience providing high-level online consulting services and can help you successfully carry out cloud migration projects and quickly solve technical problems.

Onsite Support at the QTS Sacramento Colocation Center
The QTS (formerly Herakles) Internet Data Center is situated in the seismically-stable Natomas neighborhood of Sacramento. For businesses currently utilizing the QTS Sacramento data center as a colocation facility or planning on migrating their primary or disaster recovery system to the QTS data center, Progent can provide a range of affordable services that include data center migration, equipment deployment and upgrades, network optimization, comprehensive project management, virtual server expertise, remote network monitoring, streamlined network administration, software development, disaster recovery planning, data security evaluation, and the use of Progent's Test Lab. Find out more about Progent's QTS data center consulting services.

The Progent Test Lab
The Progent Test and Design Lab is a room at the QTS Internet Data Center with a variety of dedicated computers and network support equipment that can be utilized remotely or on premises to accommodate piloting, evaluations, capacity modeling, troubleshooting, business continuity simulation, education, and additional purposes to help Progent's clients successfully carry out major IT initiatives. Learn more about Progent's Test Lab at the QTS Data Center.

Virtualization Expertise
Progent can provide expert consulting to help midsize businesses efficiently deploy advanced virtual server platforms in order to save money, improve reliability, and streamline disaster recovery. Progent offers and VMware vSphere integration, VMware Site Recovery Manager consulting, VMware NSX virtual network design and deployment, Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V consulting, Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V planning and deployment, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V integration, and Citrix XenServer expertise. For delivering virtual Windows desktops and applications, Progent's Citrix-certified engineers can provide Citrix XenDesktop support and Citrix XenApp consulting. Progent's engineers can help midsize businesses design networks that get the full benefit of virtualization, implement virtual servers and desktops to enhance network performance, dependability, and manageability while cutting expenses, create and validate business continuity procedures that reduce downtime in the event of a catastrophic network failure, and provide continuing consulting and support for virtualized environments.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager-based Network Support Packages
Progent has developed special Network Support Packages based on the automated problem detection and analysis capabilities of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, a powerful network management platform that monitors the reliability, throughput, and security of your network servers and alerts you to problems before they can impact your productivity. Progent's Network Support Packages also include network evaluation, security assessment, Help Desk support, and the design of secure data links between your system and Progent's support engineers. Find out more about Progent's special Network Support Packages for cost-effective IT support outsourcing.

To find additional information on our network support offerings, refer to our Datasheets for IS Outsourcing and Server Monitoring Packages, available in Adobe Acrobat format for convenient printing.

For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager helped a business achieve enterprise-class network management, read the Microsoft Operations Manager Case Study.

To contact Progent about Network Support Packages for mid-size businesses, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.