Objective

NetApp decided it was time to re-strategize in order to transition their end customers from consultative engagements into more structured managed services engagements. This was a significant transition from NetApp’s previous offering, as the company had simply provided their customers with the products and services they needed in order to build a strong hybrid cloud infrastructure. Their desire was to supplement their offerings by providing comprehensive support through the management of the products and services they manufacture and sell. By extending their offerings to include managed services NetApp could both considerably increase their own profits and reduce their customers expenses.

In order to offer this new program, they required that the headcount for the managed services division be reduced, that efficiencies be added to the system and processes within the department, and that all operations under managed services be streamlined. These caveats would help to reduce NetApp’s operating costs and in turn would allow NetApp to lower prices for their customers.

Challenge

In order to reduce the team size, as well as expand the customer offering to managed services, many aspects of the system and processes involved needed to be optimized. For this optimization to occur, inefficiencies needed to be pinpointed and broken processes needed to be fixed.

NetApp needed to find the proper talent that could handle the growing workload with less team members. As technology advances, fewer and fewer IT professionals can fill every role needed within a company. The need for IT specialists far outweighs the number of qualified candidates on the market, creating a strain for hiring managers.

Additionally, when it comes to NetApp customers and their previous transactions with NetApp, all expenses were capital. This, in turn, meant that NetApp would need to fully understand both the operational and capital expenditure challenges that their customers face and find ways to help them create savings and cost-effective purchases.

Solution

In order to help NetApp achieve their objective, while also addressing the various challenges they and their customers were facing, Entelligence provided a team of consultants, including a Service Delivery Manager and a NetApp Technical SME.

The team was able to reduce NetApp’s expenses, upgrade, and maintenance of the physical hardware and software that will provide the new managed services offering. The Entelligence consultants’ technical expertise enabled them to comprehensively assist in NetApp’s managed services delivery of customer data storage. Some of the specific tasks that the Entelligence consultants assisted NetApp’s team with included:

• 24/7 tactical support and monitoring of environment

• Systematic review services

• Incident triage

• Incident investigation, diagnostics, resolution, and recovery

• Service request fulfillment

• Proactive issue detection, alert, and escalation

• Administrative reporting

• Upgrades and patch management

• ITIL implementation

• Capacity planning

• Storage management best practices alignment to meet service level objective

• Change management

• Release management

Results

Entelligence was able to provide the right consultants who could comprehensively understand and address the job; as well as determine how to solve as many problems as possible with the fewest amount of resources. Instead of simply providing the service, these consultants were able to come in and work with NetApp’s team to build them up while also reducing their full time employee headcount by 65%. The team members can now be redeployed by NetApp to focus on other strategic initiatives that will help the organization grow. In the end, the consultants exceeded the objective by 100% with zero escalations, created cost savings, and increased gross margin by fixing errors that the company had long been struggling with.

About Entelligence

At Entelligence, we believe in elevating lives, careers, and communities. This means providing the best solutions so you can grow your business and stop focusing on project failures, false starts, and escalations. We do this by hiring, training, and deploying the most innovative, productive, and engaged IT consultants to OEMs, VARs, and Fortune 500 companies to tackle the most challenging enterprise IT projects. Our consultants are not only at the top of their technology game, but they also have the communication, project management, and execution skills that promote compatibility with your existing workforce.

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