Details

Energy Infrastructure Company Extends Its Relationship with ePlus for Managed Services

Local support and detailed metrics alleviate burden on staff and improve business insight

The energy company was dissatisfied with its previous Managed Services provider, who did not provide local resources to support the customer’s wide area network and routers/WAN circuits—failing to provide an on-going quality service experience.
The unregulated power entity has many sites (including wind and solar farms in remote locations). This placed a strong burden on its small team of network engineers who were on call after hours to handle trouble tickets for its wide area network, including circuits at remote sites.The team was facing burnout and staff turnover was increasing.
The company sought to out-task this function as well as obtain 24/7 coverage of carriers and first call support.

Established trusted IT advisor status through prior professional services engagements (including two data center/colocation moves as well as voice and video integration).
Mature Managed Services practice and processes/tools.
Ability to provide local resources, continuity, and an onsite presence with weekly contact.

Managed Services for Cisco core network, Cisco Call Manager voice environment, primary and disaster recovery sites, and wide area network to all remote sites (including wind and solar farms).
Three large Professional Services engagements across multiple groups for project-level support as needed to augment Managed Services capabilities.
Staffing solution placed full-time Junior Network Engineer on site.

Vastly improved service provided by dedicated local ePlus Customer Success Manager who provides weekly onsite support to help handle open questions and requests.
Weekly reports provide at-a-glance visual depiction of the overall health and performance of the customer’s environment, showing metrics related to events/incidents, ePlus resources deployed, open change requests, devices by events and events by technology, and insights for improved decision making.
Quarterly Service Business Reviews performed on-site deliver aggregate detail and metrics to further review network health and performance and aid in decision making.
24/7 proactive network management of the customer’s WAN and circuit providers at remote sites relieves pressure from on-call rotation and burden placed on staff—improving job satisfaction, reducing staff turnover, and allowing internal resources to focus on business-critical tasks.
Comfort level in ePlus’ tools, people, and processes to provide peace of mind and improve the stability and health of its network.
ePlus advanced tools helped the customer investigate, isolate, and remediate performance and service level problems before they had an impact on the company’s bottom line.
On-site ePlus resources help the customer operationalize day-to-day activities and frees up the time of client engineers to focus on business value-add projects.