Q: Why is Cobweb the biggest provider
of Microsoft Managed Services in the UK and Europe?
A: Because our Customers are Long-Term
customers (Average customer tenure 31 months)
For sure there are many Hosting companies in
the UK and Europe with big POP3 mail platforms but what we
think is important is the scale and capability to provide and
service what we call MAPI mailboxes. These are the type of
mailboxes that connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server and offer the
full functionality of online and offline working, share calendars,
tasks and public folders. Our customers tell us that they want to
Partner with an established company who has made the right
investments in its business and technology platforms to be able
provide a money backed Service Level Agreement that actually means
something.
With the recent announcement by Microsoft to
enter the Online Service business by offering a vanilla version of
Hosted Exchange and SharePoint through its Partner Channel we
believe the market in the UK is set for consolidation – We know it
is very difficult to run a profitable Hosted Exchange business with
less than 5000 – 10,000 users. To ensure peace of mind we recommend
you ask the important questions from your proposed partner –
see our useful guide
to selecting a Hosted Exchange Provider here.
By selecting the leading partner in the UK you
can rest easy knowing that you have reduced your risk and that we
will be investing on your behalf every week and month of the
year.
Experience is not just about longevity – At
Cobweb our experience and expertise comes from a strategic approach
to our learning and delivery model. We believe People are the
centre of our service delivery model, with some of our most trusted
and experienced technical people having been with the business for
5 to 8 years – not bad for a company born 11 years ago... Our
skill sets can be complex and specialised which is why our Service
Desk with over 25 agents is so important for us – We would never
outsource this function as it is the breeding ground for the new
talent of tomorrow. This approach ensures that we are continually
building on our own Cobweb IP and knowledge – We recognise that
this can lead to our good service agents leaving the Customer
Service Desk and moving onto other areas and we minimise the
negative customer impact by ensuring we have the right tools such
as internal and external knowledge bases, good training for less
experienced agents and a culture of knowledge sharing across
teams.
Delivering a robust, secure and reliable
Managed Messaging or Data Management solution is not easy,
delivering at scale like we do is even harder, but our
experience ensures that we have lower than industry standard rate
of Customer attrition and Customer Satisfaction rates remain
consistently high.
External accreditations and auditing is a
vital part of our Business Strategy – Business Process experts
constantly prove that what is measured will improve and we believe
there is no better way of managing business systems and process
than being able to work to a predefined and proven framework and
regularly reviewing performance. Our business framework includes
ISO9001, ISO27001 and the Microsoft Prognostics Customer
Satisfaction tools, if you add that with our Business planning
activities and strict monthly financial performance monitoring we
have a series of Monthly and quarterly check and checkpoints that
drive Process and Service improvements.
The Managed Services marketplace is moving as
fast as the online world, it is only by good business management a
Managed Service Company can constantly deliver an up-to-date set of
services that meet the changing needs of its customers.
As our business has grown we have steadily
made increasing investments in our technical platforms and people.
This is vital – If you are not moving forward you are moving
backwards. Investments this year have been in our EMC storage
platforms, Tape backup Library, Network load balancers and switch,
Scaling of the Exchange platform including two new back ends
increasing capacity but some 16,000 mailboxes. Additional
investment has been made in the soon to be live Provisioning and
Billing platform that sits behind the new Exchange and SharePoint
2007 platform. In the coming fiscal year investments will continue
to be made in platform scalability and in addition the provision of
a 3rd Data-centre facility to drive to even greater
redundancy and platform resilience.
In Partnership With
