According to Jeremy Malcolm, MD of Tectight Enterprise Technologies, outsourcing your entire IT environment to a service provider is not without risk. He says that relying too heavily on a single outsourcer to provide the necessary skills means it becomes difficult to disentangle yourself from them, even if their service fails to properly deliver.

So how can businesses take advantage of the benefits of outsourcing, without leaving themselves open to such risk? The answer, says Malcolm, lies in adopting a co-sourcing, rather than an outsourcing approach.

“When it comes to the more commoditised services, such as desktop support, outsourcing is a perfectly reasonable solution. However, when you start talking about your high-end infrastructure, there is always a level of site specific knowledge that you want to retain in-house,” he says.

“Co-sourcing offers the best of both worlds, in that you can hire the experts to look after your infrastructure, but because your own people work closely with them, no irreplaceable knowledge is lost. This is crucial, because should you decide to change partners, you are able to do so without exposing your business to risk.”

Malcolm says there are many and varied reasons why organisations consider entering into a co-sourcing agreement. Generally, these are related to either a lack of skill within the business or an inability to retain the relevant skills.

“Skills are always an issue, particularly with smaller organisations, since their IT people are not usually specialists. They are expected to be a jack-of-all-trades, which means that they end up having a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things. Unfortunately, in the technical environment we work in, a little bit of knowledge is actually a dangerous thing.”

After all, he adds, when you are dealing with issues such as system availability and support, technology and firmware upgrades, not to mention patch management, you dare not make a mistake.

“This is why our customers choose the co-source option. They are able to utilise Tectight’s range of skills as and when they require them, rather than paying for a dedicated resource that doesn’t actually know enough anyway. Co-sourcing also enables the customer to tap into a much wider pool of specialised resources, while reducing their overheads,” continues Malcolm.

At its most fundamental, co-sourcing means that we will assist the client to get to a point where they can manage their technical environment themselves, calling on our skills only when needed. From a Tectight perspective, the company’s key role is in the stabilisation of the customer’s environment, but wherever skills are required, it can bring these to bear for the client.

“While we do perform monthly site visits as part of maintaining our relationships with customers, we are finding that as the co-sourcing relationship develops, clients become more comfortable with the idea of remote support. We gain access via a VPN and are usually able to sort out problems without having to be on site. This expedites the response time, enabling us to solve problems as quickly as if we were physically there.”

“I think that the biggest benefit Tectight can offer its customers in respect of co-sourcing is the wide range of skills we have to offer. Our people are constantly gaining additional experience across a wide range of clients. These experiences can more often than not be applied to situations faced by other customers. This is of particular value to our smaller clients. What we have learned from working with enterprises can also be applied to their environments, meaning they avoid the sharp learning curve that otherwise accompanies such experience,” he concludes.

The company focuses on delivering and maintaining solutions on IBM infrastructure and related products, thanks to its highly specialised and skilled team. These employees are completely dedicated to the client and ensure consistently high levels of service excellence.

“Our approach is that of being an organisation that offers specialised boutique solutions. This focus has resulted in our company earning a sterling reputation as both a service provider to many organisations, as well as being a strategic partner to a number of leading IT vendors in the South African market,” says Jeremy Malcolm, Managing Director at Tectight.

“We remain a relatively small and focused entity, with a total of just under 20 people in the organisation. However, our real strength lies in the fact that this highly qualified team has worked together for around a decade already.”

Malcolm explains that the entire team were part of one of Faritec’s more profitable divisions. When that company folded, the team joined together to found Tectight, retaining virtually all of the key clients it had been servicing for the past decade. Clearly, he suggests, the customers were more than happy with the service they had been receiving, considering they stuck with Tectight, even though it was effectively a small business start-up. Even more impressive than the retention of existing clients is that Tectight has, in a relatively short period of time, managed to secure the ongoing business of a number of new clients, which includes procurement, projects and/or ongoing support agreements.
“Our people are renowned for providing powerful, transformational IT solutions and services. These are delivered with flexibility, reliability and integrity to a broad spectrum of clients. We founded the company on the belief that it is the people and the culture of an organisation that truly makes the difference – and so far, we have certainly been proven right,” Malcolm says.

Tectight Enterprise Technologies is an IBM Premier Partner and achieved this in a record period of time. This was due to the fact that the Tectight team between them had so many of the required certifications that the company qualified immediately as a Premier Partner.

“The Partner status is based on having full certification across the delivered platform. Our team between them has over 60 IBM certifications in their areas of specialisation, along with the experience that goes with these, so while we may be small in size, we are big on delivery,” states Malcolm. The main products that the company focuses on, he continues, are the IBM System X,System P technologies and IBM Storage Solutions, as well as Tivoli Storage Manager and VMware.

A clear indicator of Tectight’s growing success is the fact that the company was recently one of three organisations nominated by VMware for its “Rising Star” of the Year Award for 2010. This was a particularly notable achievement, considering the competition were organisations that were large IT solutions providers with years in the industry, while Tectight had only been trading for six months at the time.

“Our goal is 100% client satisfaction, 100% of the time; as such, we abide by four key principles. The first is Reliability, in that we anticipate and resolve customer issues promptly. Then there is Integrity, inasmuch as we are dedicated to our clients’ success and deliver performance beyond expectation. Our third principle is Flexibility, since it is crucial to be responsive and proactive, while providing solutions that really meet customer requirements. Finally, we believe in Speciality, whereby although we are leading specialists within certain areas of specialisation, we will also partner with like minded organisations to ensure we deliver the exceptional solutions we promise,” concludes Malcolm.