Each year, our sister publication Computer Dealer News hosts the Channel Elite Awards to recognize IT Solution Provider for their innovation, leadership, and commitment for creating value for their customers. As Canada’s leading IT channel publication, CDN invited solution providers to submit their best work to nine different categories for 2013’s awards. Here, we present the case studies these award nominees put forward to us. Find out who the big winners are on Sept. 11 when CDN presents them at the CEA Awards Gala.
Learn more about CDN’s Channel Elite Awards 2013
Nominee: Commerx Computer Systems from Mississauga, Ontario
Managed Services Solution description
Commerx provides an enterprise wide scalable managed services offering. The key differentiators is our ability to manage disparate hardware, software and operating environments not typically suited for managed services practice. This is based on Commerx’s heritage of Unix Datacenter and Mission Critical support which is how we have tailored our services. These services include not only traditional Microsoft and Linux operating environments but are scaled to support enterprise, legacy and complex Unix platforms. Commerx accomplishes this by leveraging our extensive storage expertise with a combined total enterprise architecture experience of 100+ years. Commerx has enabled our customers to capitalize and extend their existing investments through our expertise and best practices management. Our continued improvement practice ensures that customers are actually able to maintain better product lifecycles.
What makes your Managed Services innovative or original compared to the competition?
Commerx is focused on customer relationships; we assign both a sales account manager and technical account manager to every customer to ensure predictability and consistency through named subject matter experts. These resources all have direct access to our customer’s department personnel and work collaboratively to ensure successful solutions. In most situations, Commerx has designed, planned and implemented the infrastructure solution so that we have intimate knowledge that is tailored specifically to the customers needs. Commerx focuses on highly customizable offerings and tailors our solutions around the customer’s individual needs. Commerx has removed the traditional constraints of a one size fits all solution.
What were the benefits of your Managed Services Solution for your client and what evidence can you provide to show this?
By removing the operational expenses of a large IT department, we were able to relieve the current IT Departmental staff of infrastructure management. By doing this, they were able to concentrate on business initiatives by developing financial applications to further enhance revenue goals. This allowed our customer to expand into foreign markets by being able to focus on core business development instead of the day-to-day IT infrastructure operations. The customer was able to save over 60% on operational costs by bringing in Commerx as their managed service provider. Commerx has been able to extend the life of our customer’s environments by continued and up-to-date maintenance of the systems.
What are the main reasons that your Managed Services are better for the customer than an on-premises solution?
Commerx Managed Services Solutions enables mid to enterprise level customers to take advantage of an ITIL standards based help desk that would not normally be available if they were to take care of their environment on their own. We have streamlined the process from ticket creation, incident management, problem resolution and root cause analysis by providing the customer with portal access where all the tickets can be managed and reviewed and reported on. Our customers are able to “share” the cost of an enterprise level solution that they would not normally have access to based on their budget and scope of project. Commerx leverages our 29+ years in the market so the customer has the distinct advantage of our maturity in incident resolution, change response, incident or problem lifecycle management. By subscribing to a 24×7 managed services solution, the customer is ensured a higher degree of availability and allows them in turn to enhance service to their customers and business partners.
How did the Managed Service improve the customer’s ability to server its internal or external clients?
Our customer is able to have instant access to subject matter experts on their full range of IT operations as well as on-tap expertise to be able to instantly escalate issues regardless of the subject matter discipline. This allows them to meet increasingly constrained SLA’s to their customers without impacting their bottom line. Commerx not only provides the Datacenter infrastructure managed services for this customer but we also provide Desktop managed Services for their staff. By removing the help desk task from the company’s small IT staff, they are able to concentrate on the initiatives that help the business in their revenue goals. Commerx Managed Services gives our customers decreased problem meantime to resolution from hours to minutes as a function of having on-tap access to subject matter experts.
How does the solution further your client’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
By delivering monitoring and management services through a shared model, Commerx has eliminated the duplication of independent discrete management silos. The customer is now in a shared co-location service being used by multiple customers on the same infrastructure thereby reducing carbon footprint.
