If we don't take care of the customer, someone else will?

Our work with small and medium businesses has led us to categorize businesses into  5 levels of maturity of their IT Department.

1. Break/Fix Service Program: Leave IT alone unless something breaks.
2. Reactive Service Program : Focus on reducing business impact from IT failure.
3. Proactive Service Program : Focus on improving service uptime.  
4. Managed Service Program: Focus on guaranteed service levels at a predictable cost.
5. Value Service Program : Focus on guaranteed business service levels.

Most of the small and medium businesses we see today fall somewhere between the reactive and proactive service programs.  Although Managed Services has been a buzz word in the industry for several years, few small and medium businesses have yet to attain that level of maturity.  We believe one reason is because the IT Services Industry has not adequate educated and explained the benefits of a Managed Services program.  Closely tied to the lack of industry education for the business community is the fact that many service providers have failed to convert their businesses to one that can provide managed services.

If you have a business whose revenue is dependent on your customer's networks to fail for revenue (time and materials model), it is very expensive to convert to a model where you are rewarded for uptime.  Vintage IT Services has made that investment.  It is now more expensive for us to service those customers that continue on time and materials versus those on managed services.  We also note that over the last five years we have never lost a customer that was on a managed services program.