Independent IT solutions provider, First Technology today announced a partnership with remote platform monitoring specialist, Space Age Technologies (SAT), that will mark the start of First Technology's improved service offering to medium-size enterprises nation-wide.
The alliance was first entered into when the two companies crossed paths in July 2003. Says Mark Wells of First Technology: "As a managed solution provider, we are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to improve our own efficiency and to offer our clients increased network uptime and proactive services designed to improve the manageability of the environment. From the outset it was clear that the SATOps Remote Platform Monitoring Service neatly fits into this vision."
Initially designed as a preventative operations management service for SMEs, SATOps will now enable First Technology to offer a stronger outsourced service through the proactive monitoring of its clients' infrastructures.
"Although we have been predominately focused on the SME market, the need for SATOps among our medium-size clients matured, and consequently brought about the development of an interdependent proactive monitoring service which is used in conjunction with the client's existing support provider, or their internal IT staff," says Mark Geschke, MD for SAT.
Focused on the four core infrastructure management areas, SATOps is designed to monitor availability; performance; security and operations parameters on a 24x7 basis. "Irregularities such as disk space alerts, backup or anti-virus problems, hardware or software issues, are transmitted to the SAT data centre where they are researched and then classified according to their criticality before they are submitted to the support partner or client notification system. The beauty is that it almost completely eliminates false alerts at inconvenient times, a problem of most of the traditional monitoring solutions," says Geschke.
Wells continued to say that while the corporate market demands continuous improvement of IT SLAs, First Technology will be able to satisfy these demands quicker and with less resources. "SATOps helps us to gain control of our clients' IT environments and to deliver more value by focusing their business objectives."
"SATOps is unique in its offering in that it offers a strong win-win-win relationship between the client that achieves higher network availability; the support provider that can schedule his resources much better due to early problem notification; and SAT as the expert remote monitoring provider. Over the past 12 months, we have partnered with support providers who all sought to provide a more preventative service to their clients, but until now were restricted to reactive support due to the shortcomings in, and unavailability of appropriate applications and/or services," concluded Geschke.
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