Management service provider, Space Age Technologies (SAT) has been awarded an outsourcing contract by the UCT's Graduate School of Business (GSB).
The three-year operations and support agreement will see the GSB outsource the majority of its data centre's operations management as well as high-end server support requirements, while internal IT staff focus on the demanding day-to-day user support and administration and the adding of new business functionality on top of the basic network platform.
"We decided to go with SAT because of their thorough insight of our technological and business requirements and their advanced remote management capabilities, experienced staff and commitment to service," says the GSB's Chief Information Officer, Lance Stringer.
Based on Microsoft's Operations Framework (MOF), which regulates skills and processes to ensure best practice by the service provider, SAT's Operations Framework was designed for the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector to provide the same sophisticated IT management services as are available to larger corporations, but at a fraction of the cost.
"We are extremely proud of our service offering; a long-term solution that assists SMEs to attain maximum value from their IT infrastructures," says Mark Geschke, Managing Director of SAT.
One of the greatest benefits to the GSB is SAT's 24-hour remote monitoring and support ability. The proactive server management services provided by SAT enable technicians to foresee and resolve server irregularities, often before the client becomes aware of or is affected by them.
SAT's locally developed Operations Architecture continually retrieves important server event-log and performance information from the GSB's servers and sends it to the SAT Data Centre in Stellenbosch. The event-information is stored and used by operations technicians to monitor the GSB's entire data centre and server platform remotely.
"An SMS gateway, installed at our Data Centre, automatically notifies stand-by technicians of any critical events received after hours. Although our service level agreement with the GSB stipulates reaction by a support technician to an incident within 30 minutes of its first manifestation, we usually respond within five minutes," says Geschke.
"Not only are we guaranteed of best practice but we have the reassurance that our servers and infrastructure are monitored and supported 24 hours a day," says Stringer. "Nothing quite compares with such peace-of-mind assurance."
In terms of the agreement, SAT will also manage a network upgrade for the GSB from its current Windows 2000-based platform to Microsoft's .Net Server upon its release. SAT assisted the GSB in its early adoption of the 2000 platform as well as its early adoption of wireless networking technology.
Says Anton Jacobz, OEM, Distribution and small and medium channel manager of Microsoft South Africa: "We are extremely pleased with both the GSB and SAT's commitment to the .Net vision. We believe that SAT is able to provide their customers with the highest level of service and integration based on their extensive investment in Microsoft technologies and their large number of technically certified staff."
"We strongly believe that SA has an increasingly important role to play within the international business sector, it is therefore imperative that SA's educational gurus identify and implement the building blocks needed to enhance learning capabilities," commented Geschke. "Since a modern and dependable IT platform, delivering true value to its users, is one of these building blocks, the GSB is well positioned to educate SA's new business leaders."
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