Computer store PC World this week launched an IT support service for small businesses that don't have their own full-time IT manager.
The product, called Remote IT Management (RITM), has been tested over the past year in partnership with Computer Associates. PC World says it is capable of solving "almost all" IT problems without an engineer having to visit the site.
"Many organisations cannot justify employing an IT manager, and so the task of IT support is handed to another member of staff, distracting them from their day to day work," said Richard Millman, marketing director of PC World Business. "The aim of RITM is to bridge this gap -- offering businesses peace of mind that their IT network is being looked after by experts, while not costing unreasonable or uncontrolled amounts of money. This leaves business people free to get on with running their business."
Firms signing up for RITM will be charged £200 a month for each server on their network, and £12.50 for each desktop PC. In return, their IT network will be linked to the central RITM centre either by a dedicated ISDN line, or via the Web. The customer's network will then be monitored and managed remotely, with the aim that many potential issues will be addressed before they are obvious to the end users.
PC World said many of the problems that will be fixed by RITM are likely to be relatively simple ones -- such as printer glitches and badly managed storage. The company said it will be able to help with major networking problems.
During the year-long beta-testing, 95 percent of problems were solved within one hour of a call from a customer, and 30 percent in less than five minutes.
Talkback
95% within 1 hour? Their engineers must be totally clued up.
How can they offer such a service for such a low price
Monitoring networks remotely ? This all sounds too good to be true.
They're hitting a Niche market really, big high street name that everyone knows who can kit them out and then offer a full support strategy. Sounds like a mini IBM.
Somebody has their head screwed on there.... hopefully the results when it goes live stay the same. Interesting to see how their monitoring goes once they have a good few customers under their belt. Watch this space i suppose!
We use MCSEs that are used to trouble-shooting every day - that's how we get the fix rates.
We monitor using CA's Unicenter TNG (used by 50% of the FSTE 500) - it's tried & tested
The Company I used to work for has had this service for a while now, I don't know where the "New Service" comes from. Although the engineers are very knowledgable and helpful it always takes ages to get through to them when you have a problem. I would also disagree with the effectiveness of their monitoring, on most occassions when we had problems they knew nothing about them until we called.
Overall I would rate the service as quite good, Re-active rather than Pro-active, a bit expensive for what you actually get which is a few reports and unlimited access to a support line but when you do eventually get to speak to someone they are very helpful
What a wonderful service this must be, MCSE's at the companys beck and call and the scalable power of Unicentre to ward off all of our network issues ;-0 and all at the extremely reasonable price of £200 per month per server. Thats a lot cheaper than hiring in an IT Monkey
Wher do I sign ?
It's a braw bricht moonlit nicht the nicht jimmy