I want to follow up the original Hosted Health Care Services: Turning Over Stones with news from my adventures. I stated before that I was and am excited about hosted services because I do believe that leveraged the right way, hosted services can impact the business bottom line positively while improving processes along the way. It won't be plug-n-play and for those thinking this, get your checkbooks ready.Following the article, we spent a lot of time between emails, conference calls and meetings discussing the plan of attack to migrate a private point-to-point network over to MPLS. In short, mission accomplished.
After nailing down the communications effort between all parties and rehashing, clarifying and confirming what we expected to happen; the IT contractor of our customer delivered on a Wednesday evening. Three of their staff members were dispatched to the three offices and I was stationed at the main site. They came equipped with a conference bridge number for all of us to dial into during the cutover. They spent three and a half hours programming and testing all the routers and failover. Next, we tested all interoffice communications--faxing, Intercom, file sharing and then Internet access including the remote health care sites. Everything was in good order. Changes were then made to all customer PCs and again, we tested.
We concluded for the evening and I reserved time for the next business day to resolve any issues. I was onsite at the main location before opening hours. There were four issues. The first was a network printer not working and we found that this was not on the inventory sheet and simply needed a new IP address. Next, some of the credit card machines (web based) were not working. We had the users power cycle them and they were immediately restored back to service. A third issue is some users cannot access their web mail or pop accounts. This isn't due to the MPLS or hosted services since the customer's ISP that we previously tracked through the former Sonicwall (firewall) logs is the suspected culprit. Sure enough, the customer confirmed that email was down corporate wide and it was due to a virus suffered by the ISP on their servers. The last issue was connectivity being intermittently lost on the Citrix clients, and we handed this off to the hosted provider.
We decided to leave the point-to-point and dedicated T1 for Internet active until a week after cutover. This way, we could easily revert back to the previous configuration. Voice quality has been excellent and no communications issues reported. The MPLS service from Verizon is Gold CAR (Committed Access Service) service. Now this is where another light went ON while reflecting on VoiceCon's Troubleshooting session. The customer is happy with the hosted service and Verizon's Gold CAR service, and why should the customer pay more to add probes and software to prove or disprove voice quality? So to the users at VoiceCon, I get why you don't want to pay for something that you already are paying for, in essence. The problem is and "always has been," that Verizon and all the other carriers are designed and inclined to be reactive more than proactive. They will respond when you call with a problem, maybe just not the same way as when you have facts, dates, times, statistics of calls and specific events. It gets down to how much downtime you can eliminate or avoid by having the right tools onboard. That downtime is worthless until you--the users/customers--can place a tangible dollar amount on it. Then, I do believe you will be able to weigh the costs and determine whether or not you need something to watch the watchers.
Now before you sign up for any hosted services you must discover who is servicing what and to what extent. In this case we're the vendor for telephony and network support; the host company for hosted services and MPLS tier 2 resolution, and then there's a third party that the customer has yet to settle on to provide first level user PC and ongoing server support. There's even another company for ISP (email and web site) support. As we have found in our office, hosted remains fragmented and often means dealing with more vendors to get best-in-class offerings vs. bundled packages that often lack what each customer wants. So be wary of hosted bundled services because you may lose functionality and or reliability, whereas with the hosted bundle you have just one call to make for support.
MPLS was out of reach had our customer not been partnered by a large public company. The service is better and I think will prove over time to be cost effective and a better way to manage bandwidth. The biggest problem our customer now faces is dealing with Verizon to disconnect their former network. Verizon is threatening them with disconnect fees, and according to the hosted provider the customer is exempt since they upgraded the services to MPLS.
Larger companies, including the Telcos, stand to benefit more through consolidation and acquisition/mergers. Cloud computing is another evolution it seems but for customers to remain viable and competitive, don't get your head stuck in the clouds with all the hype about hosted services. Someone needs to mind the store back at the home front, and this includes support, managing vendors and maintaining infrastructure that won't likely vaporize within the cloud anytime soon. Lastly, before you sign, be sure to have an alternative exit plan. When hosted services go south--and they do and may--how quickly can you move your services to another provider or take them in-house again?
