Cobweb; Biggest Provider

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. This is the type of mailbox that connects to a Microsoft Exchange Server and offers 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. 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 26 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 3^rd Data-centre facility to drive to even greater redundancy and platform resilience.