Services & Products
We consider our services to be our products. Most of the time, we're supposed to think of these two as separate categories. You may have heard of "SaaS" or Software as a Service. Our inside joke is that we offer Service as a Service. That is to say, we put both uptime and the customer experience as our twin #1 priorities.
So what's a service disguised as a product produce? Happy customers.
And getting and keeping our customers happy is so important that we do think of our services as products, precisely because that produces happy customers (see our Testimonials page).
Currently, we offer two technical support services for customers. Two others are "in the works" and will be rolled out as soon as all licensing and testing issues have been successfully resolved.
The two services currently on offer are:
- Onsite Technical Support: This is the traditional approach to computer, network and IT consulting. It's tried and true. It's also time-consuming and disruptive to client workflows, so you'll be please to note that it is a service that we would least like to provide. Onsite technical support is the last-ditch approach to complex IT problem-solving. And really, in this day and age where Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) is fast becoming the go-to approach to customer IT support, Onsite Technical Support should only be used if and when there are hardware problems, which obviously can't be fixed via a Remote connection, and secondly, when there is some sort of network connectivity problem which would preclude the use of RMM anyway.
- Manually-based Remote Management and Monitoring: We use Teamviewer® and AnyDesk®, both high-quality, secure, high-reliability proprietary software that allows our technical staff to access your computer(s) and other computing devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets, servers, even smartphones!). Each session's access is controlled by you, not us. We can only access your system with your permission. Passwords are one-time-only, and therefore change after each session. Both of these tools use VPNs or Virtual Private Networks. This ensures a very high degree of transmission security, meaning that only you and our technical team members can see your files etc.
Future Proposed Services Still In Development:
- Automated Remote Management and Maintenance: This is software that will enable 24/7 monitoring of all the computers and network devices such as ADSL and Cable Modem-routers, routers suitable for SOHO and small business offices, more sophisticated routers such as those offered by Juniper®, and Cisco Systems®, as well as "smart" switches that are SNMP-capable (but don't worry, we handle the techno-gobbledy-gook, that's what we're here for). This software will be capable of automated alerting so that we know -- sometimes before you do -- about problems in your network. We hope to have this service/product implemented for customers within 3-5 months from now.
- Automated Remote Management and Maintenance Plus: This is our enhanced, mostly in-house-developed solution that will take our ability to monitor and fix problems to an entirely new level. There are two secret ingredients to this service. The first is Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which takes all the computers and computing devices it is monitoring and treats them as though they were end-nodes in a vast mega-network also called a WAN (Wide Area Network; the biggest WAN in the world is the Internet itself). Of course each customer's network is isolated from anyone else's network, but the underlying principles are not much different from those where SDN is deployed in multi-branch companies. The second bit of "magic" will be a version of Linux, itself a computer operating system, the same way Windows,the macOS, Android, and iOS are all computer operating systems. This version of Linux will combine the WAN capabilities of a large-scale-capable Linux "version" (distribution or "distro") like RedHat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Enterprise Linux with the ability, built-in, to do automated Remote Management and Monitoring. This is a longer term project, and we will let people know of our progress through our easy-for-laypeople technical blog.