Business Connexion has inked a deal with Microsoft South Africa to provide joint support services under the Microsoft Authorised Premier Support (MAPS) programme.
The deal adds to the existing Gold Partner status support that Business Connexion clients enjoy and is designed to provide customers with support direct from the vendor without bypassing the partner, at local pricing.
"We are becoming more proactive in our customer support, to solve issues before they become problems," says Wayne Pienaar, partner services development manager at Microsoft South Africa. "We are rolling out our support programme through partners and with partners. The added benefit to customers is that our partners can provide support for more than Microsoft software, which we are tied to."
MAPS is similar to a Premier Support agreement with Microsoft, with the addition of local partner services. Customers get a deeper peek into Microsoft`s searchable database of support problems and resolutions, they get critical problem alerts, recorded technical briefings from Microsoft experts and they get a TechNET subscription and newsflashes.
The contract is flexible and allows for between 15 and 75 calls for different issues to the helpdesk and Microsoft guarantees response times. Hot fixes are also available from the Microsoft special development team.
"The major value of the MAPS programme to our clients is that they have a technical account manager assigned to look after them," says Bruce Krebs, marketing director at Business Connexion. "The technical account manager assists clients in their Microsoft strategy, server design, database design, Exchange design and makes recommendations on most effectively deploying Microsoft technologies throughout the business."
For every four hours of support delivered by Business Connexion, Microsoft adds one hour of a technical account manager`s time but MAPS agreements can be tailored to the needs of the customer.
MAPS promotes best practices in IT operations through the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). MOF provides technical guidance that enables organisations to achieve mission-critical system reliability, availability, manageability and support ability of Microsoft products and technologies. It also extends the ITIL code of practice to support distributed IT environments and industry trends such as application hosting and Web-based transactional and e-commerce systems.
ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library standard, is a consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT service management. It is an initiative by the Office of Government Commerce in the UK.
"The ethos behind the development of ITIL is recognition that organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs, leading to an increased requirement for high quality IT services," concludes Pienaar.
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