PCG’s Co-Managed Services (Podcast)
Explore PCG’s Co-Managed Services and learn how businesses benefit from flexible IT support as we discuss value, services, and trends in co-managed IT.
John Maher: Welcome to Tech Tuesday. Brought to you by PCG, a managed services and security provider in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I’m John Maher. With me from PCG is CEO and founder Dave Hodgdon. Welcome Dave.
Dave Hodgdon: Welcome John. Always a pleasure to be with you.
John: Absolutely. And our special guest today is Jason Gilbert, director of IT Services. Welcome, Jason.
Jason Gilbert: Thanks. Happy to be here.
The Difference Between Managed Services and Co-Managed Services
John: Great. So Dave, today we’re talking about PCG’s co-managed services and the value that it can bring to businesses with IT in-house. What’s the difference between a managed services contract and a co-managed services contract?
Dave: Fantastic question, John. So historically, PCG has been, in name, what’s known as a “managed [IT]”. We are the primary person that does everything; the help desk, the network operations center, the engineer, renew their licenses, deal with their vendors, do anything possible for one flat fee per month. They historically don’t have any IT in-house; they typically range from 5 to 50 users.
There’s a huge surge – and we do that market very well – we’ve noticed over the last three to four years, a surge. I think a lot of it happened after COVID and a lot of people were leaving work, and a lot of these organizations that are 50 to 250 to 500 users, John, just can’t rely on that one person to do everything. The world of cybersecurity stepped up there. It’s very complex. There’s a lot of projects that need to be done. There’s a huge stress level for an individual person expected to do everything.
They have no time to learn new stuff. They don’t have access to the services that we have. And we’ve just seen this trend, John, that we are just having more and more discussions [about]. We’re having more discussions [about] co-managed now than ever, more than the MSP environment. So, we thought it was very important for PCG to take a good look at that and come up with a plan.
And it ultimately comes down to flexibility. Once we know what’s in that place, what do they have, and what do they [not] have? Well, I’ve got help desk. Great. We’ll be your backup for escalations. Are you monitoring all your equipment? No. Well, we can be your network operations center. Where are you at with your security stack, your cyber insurance, your compliance? Well, we kind of struggle with that; then we can add those services.
So, there’s hundreds of services that we can give to them. So, once we understand when they’re there, there kind has to be some baseline of commonality, that we just can’t support everything under the sun. We’re in this together. There’s some environments, if they’re all Google Workspace, all Macs, that’s not the right fit. But if they’re in the Windows world using 365, they have some stuff on Amazon or Azure, there becomes a fit for both sides. And once we understand what’s in place, PCG is a phenomenal asset because of the resources, our processes, our procedures, and access to everything we as an IT department have done. That’s all we do, John, is IT. Their job is just to support their users.
Benefits of a Co-Managed IT Agreement
John: And Jason, what do you see as being some of the key benefits of a co-managed agreement?
Jason: I think the biggest advantage is just the depth of support that we can offer. So, I’m maybe uniquely positioned here to talk about this because I’ve lived on both sides of being a client of an MSP in the past. Then having worked for an MSP that worked solely with co-managed clients, to now being with PCG for almost four years. So, we have that flexibility as Dave mentioned, to focus just on help desk and maybe patching of servers and maybe the security stack, right? But we can also do monitoring of servers and we can help with advanced IT projects and migrations.
So, we’ve got that depth of knowledge that is very difficult to attain anything comparable for a small company or even a mid-size company at that. So, we’re dedicated to hiring engineers that are pursuing their expertise, they’re pursuing training. We carve out time every quarter for all engineers to get training and certifications. We put a tremendous value into that. And by extension that means that when we come to the table with a co-managed IT client, we’re able to bring to bear an awful lot of expertise, right?
So, if you’ve got somebody who’s awesome at security but he doesn’t know much about Azure, we can fill that gap. If it’s the other way around, we do that too, right? So, we can do as much or as little as a co-managed IT client needs from us. So, we’re a great fit in an awful lot of different scenarios and we’re not looking to displace anybody, right? We’re looking to be partners with somebody where, generally speaking, if there’s an IT person and a client, and he’s been there a long time and he knows the ins and outs of whatever their custom software is or the nature of their business, we don’t want to take that away from them. You’re good at that, that’s great. We’re good at some other things. How can we help you? So, that’s really where I think we shine.
Dave: I agree with that, John, about leveraging each size for the day-to-day nuances of all that little stuff that’s specific. Out in the manufacturing floor, there’s always issues with the CNC machine, it needs a lot of touchy-feely. So, from that standpoint, we’re able to leverage each other. In the old days we might’ve thought about displacing that person, but we 100%, in a co-managed environment, want that person there to help us, and they’re going to want us there to help them. And together it’s a win-win.
Typical Client Size for Co-Managed IT Services
John: Dave, talk a little bit more about the typical type of client or size of client that really kind of works well in a co-managed environment.
Dave: I would say that your typical seat count, John, appears to be between 50 and 250. Your average business is not going to typically have IT analysis. Now, there’s a lot of our clients that have, they kind wear the hat of it, they know what’s going on, but they’re truly not in the IT environment. But we’re really seeing about the 50-250. There’s an IT person in-house and we know why it’s there and that’s the type of client we’re going up. It doesn’t matter the industry, it doesn’t matter the geographic. We’re able to extend further because typically we like that touchy feeling. We’re on site for stuff, John. We’re seeing clients that are 60, 90, 120, different states. We’re starting to see an area that they’re looking for. And when I’m speaking to these people, they love our flexibility, the types that we offer, and giving them a huge value.
Industries and Geographic Locations for Co-Managed
John: You mentioned manufacturing, but does it matter what industry they’re in or even what geographic location they’re in?
Dave: Typically, John, there’s about 8 to 10 industries that we do very well in. We historically don’t go after schools, so I wouldn’t say that’s an environment, because they are in the Mac environment, a lot of tablets, [Chromebooks]. But whether you’re in a legal, financial, insurance, professional services, manufacturing, distribution, oil & propane, those are the type of environments that we’re looking for. Manufacturing has just really picked up momentum here in New England. So, a lot of those people are looking to leverage technology.
John: And in terms of their geographic location, does it matter whether or not they’re in your area or can you work with a co-managed agreement that’s remote?
Dave: A hundred percent John. That’s the goal and stage with everything being remote. If that person’s the boots on the ground, that’s ideally what we’re looking for and we can do a hundred percent of what we’re looking to do remotely.
Offerings in a Co-Managed Services Agreement
John: Okay. Jason, can you talk to us about some of the actual offerings in a co-managed services agreement?
Jason: Yeah, so basically, in order for us to be effective and efficient and successful, we’ve been effectively tailoring our tool set and our whole suite of assets, software and tools and processes, that we use to deliver the services we do. So, when we bring on somebody in a co-managed environment, we’re able to carve out chunks of those applications, or those processes, and make them available to our new peers in the in-house IT department. Oftentimes a huge benefit I see there, and again, having been on the other side of it, I’ve worked in IT environments where we didn’t have a ticketing system because it was going to be an expensive burden and a big project to implement it. So, people would walk up and ask for help, or they were at one point coming to my email, and trying to keep on top of all of that is just a nightmare.
And then inevitably you move up to something like a spreadsheet and you try to keep track of tickets in that, but can’t really do much for reporting. It’s really hard to justify hiring another body in the IT department or to convince somebody you need to replace a piece of equipment or a piece of software without some decent reporting behind it, right?
And then the remote access tools. So, if you’re trying to patch, let’s say 200 machines, and you want to be able to remotely support them and some of them are being taken on the road by traveling salespeople or people working from home, if you don’t have good remote access tools to support them, it becomes very difficult. You’re trying to walk people through how to diagnose or troubleshoot their own problems over the phone, blind, right?
So, you can invest in a lot of tools to do those sorts of things and they’re not prohibitively expensive, but if you’re a small IT department, you might not have the funds for it. So, in a co-managed environment, we have all those tools out of necessity. We have to have them as an MSP. So, we’re able to extend those tools to our clients and to the IT departments for the in-house department, and they’re able to leverage those tools and gain a dramatic increase in their productivity, the intelligence behind the reporting and identifying trends, what nature of tickets they’re trying to troubleshoot, justifying capital expenses for new servers, and the list goes on.
John: So, is that basically what you would say to a company who’s saying, “well, I already have somebody in-house who does IT? Why would I want to outsource to PCG?” It’s just this added value that you can do a lot of the things that the in-house person either can’t do because they don’t have the tools for it or they just don’t have the time to do it?
Jason: Right. I mean, not to mention, does that guy ever take a vacation? Does all IT productivity stop for a week or two weeks a year, or more, when he’s out? Or has he ever been sick? Right? Is he an expert in HIPAA compliance? Does he also know how to migrate a server to Azure? Right? I mean nobody knows all of those things, which is why we have a bank of engineers who each specialize in a number of technologies, but none of them knows everything. And by bringing us in to help, we’re basically that secret weapon in your pocket when something comes up, and you’re like, “wow, we never thought we’d have this kind of problem with this technology, but we are really stuck. We’re not sure what to do with it.” You can call us, and odds are good we have somebody who knows how to do it.
Is Co-Managed IT Growing?
John: Dave, are you seeing this co-managed style of business growing over the next one to three years?
Dave: John, I would say two years ago it was 0% of our business. Last year was about 5%. This year it’s up to about 10% to 15%. And I would say more than the half the discussions we’re having right now is with an IT in-house. So, we are seeing the trend. I belong to many peer groups and MSPs. They’re seeing a trend. So, it’s no question, as Jason was talking about, a single IT person just can’t have the skillset as we do with 15 people in our tech team. They don’t have the time to learn. They’re there to put out fires. I think the ownership of that would rather have them help. We’ve got this new software, let’s spend time to train, let’s nail this down. You’re getting stuck in these other areas that we can help with. So, I think if we can leverage what PCG has to offer – and there’s a lot that we can offer – let’s see what we’re good at together, from working together on a flexible plan. But I envision this business next year to probably be 30%, and I just see it growing, John.
John: And as part of that, on the flip side, yes, there’s a lot of things that the in-house person can’t do, and so it makes a lot of sense to outsource those things to PCG. On the flip side of that, only outsourcing to PCG your IT, you lose that value of having somebody right there on the ground at the company. And so, this co-managed thing just makes a lot of sense because you have that person right there at the company who can take care of those fast little things that need to happen. Or like you said, training and things like that, and then you can handle all of the other stuff.
Dave: Correct.
Other Services
John: Yeah. Besides the co-managed agreement, what other services, Dave, can PCG bring to these companies?
Dave: What we’re talking about, John, is the skillset. So, it could be a risk assessment, it could be the ability to really understand what compliance is and bring in the security tools. Back in 2016, ’17, John, we’re looking at two or three security tools. There’s over 30 to 35, we’re constantly evaluating as what is there to keep these actors – and I call these “bad actors” – we want to keep them out to protect your cash, to protect your users, and your business. They might not have the skillset.
Our phone system is aging, so that we need to change our voice system out. They might not have the ability. We need to run new wiring, we’re going to add onto our building. We need to run wiring to the new wing of the building. We are looking at a major transition to move our servers from on-premise to the cloud. You know what? We really would like to add a better wireless to our environment, or digital signage, which is becoming hot in many environments, John, to present the data necessary to their clients and employees. We’re seeing surveillance cameras pick up. So, we have the ability, as we call projects, that there’s certain aspect of their business, if they need something, not only do they have their co-managed, but we can help them facilitate with numerous solutions to help them with their business.
What If We Just Want to Email Somebody?
John: Jason, some clients might resist having something like a ticketing system implemented saying “I’d just rather email somebody when a problem comes up.” What’s your quick response to that?
Jason: Yeah, honestly, I love it when I hear that from an end-user, because I think once you have a conversation with that user and you tell them like, Hey, all you’re going to do is send an email anyway, you’re just…instead of sending it to Brenda in accounting who’s good with computers, you’re going to send it to help@pcgit, and the ticket creates itself. So there’s literally no additional burden on the user. It would be hard to make it much easier than that, right?
But the things that they’re gain from that, and we’ve consistently seen this once we’ve gotten an IT department, whether it’s before my time with PCG, when I was in IT, working in IT myself, or when we’ve deployed this for a co-managed IT department, the increase in organization and prioritization of tickets, the number of tickets that don’t fall through the cracks because our ticketing system has a boatload of safeguards to make sure nothing gets missed.
The more consistent resolution times, when a user says, “You fixed this three months ago, don’t you know how to do it?” The answer is yes, we do now, because we have a ticketing system. Consistently, every time I’ve seen us roll this out, if and when there’s been any kind of pushback at all, it’s evaporated almost immediately because it’s not just great for the IT department, it’s not just great for PCG, it truly does help the end users as well.
Reasons to Consider Outsourcing IT Services to PCG
John: So, you talked a lot about the different services that are available. What are the management and decision makers biggest reasons on why they should consider outsourcing those particular services to PCG?
Jason: I would say that being able to know what your IT department’s doing. Are they being efficient? Do you need to hire another body because you’ve got one user who doesn’t know how to use your system and is submitting an inordinate number of tickets, when maybe it would make sense to get that user a little bit of training? Or is it a matter of, you guys are too busy trying to keep your server from keeling over in the middle of the day because, maybe, it’s not the right piece of equipment for your environment.
So, you’re losing productivity for your users. Your IT is tied up trying to band-aid your environment that’s just leaking from too many different places. And instead, if we were to come in and say, “look, we can take over the patching of this equipment. We’ll make sure it stays up. We’ll find the root cause for why the server keeps dying.” We’ll plug those holes in the leaking ship, and that frees up your IT team to help drive the business and do more IT steering, and what frankly most IT guys are kind of striving towards. They want to work on the bigger, better, more interesting, more challenging mind-candy, so to speak, of, “what software could we leverage to make the business more effective? How can we produce more widgets if we had this piece of equipment, or that process, or some form of IT automation or data management?” So, us being able to step in and show management the increased business intelligence that you can achieve through a ticketing system and trend analysis and evaluating your IT resources lets them make better decisions about their IT spend and get more value for every dollar they spend in IT.
Flexible Co-Managed IT Agreements
John: Right. Dave, finally, in a co-managed environment like this, can a client be very flexible in terms of their agreement and what services they’re hiring you out for?
Dave: Yeah, John, the calls I’ve been having with these IT people, when they talk to me, is that some of the other people they’re trying to talk to, the quota says it’s this way or no way. There doesn’t seem to be any flexibility or adaptability. Yeah, we have our preferred stack, but let’s say they’ve got a sonic wall, we can work with that. They’ve got some information in place. As long as we’re defining the boundaries of what they can do and what we can do, we’re happy doing that. So, it’s very important that both sides are communicating what’s in place, and then we decide what’s there. But they’re starting to see the value, John, some of the things…we have a direct line to Microsoft. Microsoft is this huge animal server, 365, and they just can’t call Microsoft. So, as we become a partner with them on a Microsoft environment, we have the ability to assist them or help escalate, to do something.
We don’t design the software ourselves either. We know a lot about it, but when we have issues, we can escalate to Microsoft 365. I think, ultimately, what I’m hearing is, from the majority of IT people, our ability to adapt, the ability to be flexible and really focused, John, on “what do they need? Do they need a network operation center? Do they need a backup help desk? Do they want us to help with their 365? Do they want to use our productivity suite of tools? Do they want us to have a dedicated engineer that we show up and stuff? Are there projects that they want us to do? Do they want to use…?”
They have some aging equipment. We offer a phenomenal service called HaaS, Hardware as a Service. So, instead of them spending capital money, we can put a device there, like a firewall, for a monthly fee as an operating expense.
We have the ability…from the security side, we’re one of the few companies in this industry that has two CISSPs on staff. That’s the highest level of certification you can get, John. It’s just not about being a technician or engineer. It’s about understanding of business policies, procedures, and asking the right questions. We have the ability to bring security into the mix, which is a huge number moving forward to all businesses. But I just think there’s so many things that we’re looking at these IT people with IT in house can leverage with PCG to really make them a much better business.
John: All right, well, that’s really great information. Jason, nice to talk to you again. Thank you for joining us.
Jason: My pleasure.
John: And as always, Dave, thanks for talking with me as well.
Dave: Tech Tuesdays, John, keep them coming.
John: And for more information, visit the PCG website at PCGIT.com or call (603)-431-4121.
