Case Study: Azure Infrastructure Management and Support
WatServ & Gateway Consulting: Serving Customers with Agile, Cost-Effective IT Solutions
See how WatServ partnered with Gateway Consulting Group to design, deploy, manage and support the Azure infrastructure for their future clients.
Gateway Consulting Group, Inc. offers FACILEX®, a suite of advanced applications used to automate key business processes in highly regulated industries such as the chemical, energy and life sciences sectors. FACILEX® software leverages SharePoint’s document management platform – along with Microsoft Word, Excel and Power BI – to enable secure, enterprise-wide access to records and data, enhancing corporate knowledge and safety. Options for deployment of FACILEX® include SaaS Subscription, Gateway Azure Cloud, Client Azure Cloud, and Client On-Prem. Some of Gateway’s customers already have FACILEX® hosted on SharePoint in Azure, and some of these customers want to offload the Azure infrastructure management and support to a third party.
SharePoint is used by more than 200 million professionals and more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies worldwide.1
Building a profitable working relationship
Strong relationships, whether personal or professional, require hard work, trust and commitment. When Gateway Consulting Group looked for a marketplace partner to help it expand its business and better serve its clients, it applied careful consideration to its search for the ideal candidate.
Gateway was understandably reluctant to engage with just any IT/cloud solutions provider. Before they learned about WatServ, Gateway’s experience with other vendors had been challenging. In one instance, the provider did not have the required technical abilities to serve the needs of Gateway’s customers. Another provider was so large and its process so cumbersome that support tickets were directed to remote personnel, in a distant time zone, resulting in delayed responses that compromised Gateway’s project timeline.
Gateway knew that they needed to find the right partner, a trusted advisor, to help shape its cloud computing strategy and IT transformation plan. As it learned more about the quality and extent of WatServ’s offerings, and began to develop an effective working relationship with WatServ, Gateway became more confident in the company’s expertise in cloud computing and SharePoint in particular.
WatServ was able to provide recommendations to Gateway for moving its business forward and helped the company articulate a strategy for expanding its offerings as an independent software vendor (ISV) with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) into global markets
In the United States alone, companies lose more than $62 billion per year due to poor customer service.2
Practical concerns
Transparency in cost and estimate
As WatServ proved that it could work within a defined budget, this strengthening partnership yielded a repeatable process with predictable outcomes, enabling Gateway to forecast costs for future projects. Gateway had a clear picture of the ROI it could expect from leveraging WatServ’s managed services, which enabled the company to communicate potential cost savings and efficiencies to its existing customer base and future prospects.
Security, reliability and disaster recovery are common concerns for any enterprise operating in the cloud. To allay the fears of Gateway’s customers, WatServ provided audit reports and compliance with generally accepted standards in the cloud ecosystem. This helped to assure clients that their data would be better protected than by on-prem solutions. WatServ was also able to assure Gateway about the scalability and reliability of the Azure cloud environment. It quickly became clear that seamless optimization of the platform and end-user uptime would be attractive selling features as Gateway and WatServ moved forward in serving their mutual customer base.
By answering these and other practical concerns, WatServ demonstrated to Gateway that it was the natural choice as a solutions partner.
The top three cloud computing concerns of tech professionals are: security, access to expertise and cost.3
Up and running
Gateway’s customers are looking for solutions to help them modernize and reduce costs as they migrate from on-prem to cloud computing environments. WatServ is the first and only partner enabling Gateway to help its customers modernize and optimize their application ecosystems, including Gateway’s FACILEX®, with Azure.
Strong relationships withstand the test of time
WatServ and Gateway have already learned that this new relationship can yield considerable benefits for their customers, such as:
- Outsourcing of Managed Services with a reliable partner is more cost effective than hiring additional team members.
- Cloud hosted services in Azure are agile, reliable, scalable and secure.
- Working with a third party allows customers to economically tap into a wide range of IT expertise including hosting, networking and security.
In this partner-to-partner success model, WatServ and Gateway combine their complementary skills to offer a broader range of solutions and help clients manage the operations, performance, scalability and security of their cloud environments.
Moving forward, WatServ will design, deploy, manage and support the Azure infrastructure for all future clients with Gateway, continuing to provide support at the application level. Their clients can enjoy peace of mind as they get back to doing what they do best.
References
[1] KWizcom “What are the benefits of SharePoint?”
[2]. FinancesOnline “71+ Essential Help Desk Statistics”
[3]. datapine “12 Cloud Computing Risks & Challenges Businesses are Facing In These Days”
Select Business Outcomes
Integration of multiple business solutions enabled Champion to improve financial planning, gain better visibility, consolidate reporting, improve customer relationship management and more.
WatServ hosted regular status calls with Champion and their VAR partner to ensure transparent communications with all parties. These calls ensured both a proactive and reactive focus on performance, technical tuning and application optimizations. Over the years of working together, this amounted to more than 225 status calls.