Highlight extends its cloud network and application performance monitoring platform with a suite of new Managed Services. By coupling its expertise with its unique SaaS offering, Highlight’s Managed Services removes management, administration, analysis and insight tasks from service providers’ internal resources, enabling cost efficiencies whilst delivering value to customers in a tough market.
The new Highlight Managed Services reportedly enables service providers to avoid the lengthy process and cost of productising Highlight through their internal systems. Service provider sales teams can now resell Highlight as a professional service without complication whilst adding profitable margin, to deliver service performance transparency to their customers.
Highlight is a single management solution for service providers and customers to share performance information. Its graphical data delivers insight into network and application performance so that providers and customers can see what is happening in near-real time and achieve proactive service management.
The data provides independent evidence to justify upgrades to networks and efficient management and cuts the time needed to resolve issues. Overall, Highlight gives greater control over day-to-day operations, creates more time for strategic planning and helps foster winning partnerships.
Edmund Cartwright, sales & marketing director at Highlight says, “With staff reductions an increasing trend in the service provider market, the remaining professionals need to sustain excellent customer service with fewer people. To make cost savings pay off, service providers must employ technology so their professionals can handle more customers effectively.
We understand the business challenges and have designed our Managed Services, so partners can focus on delivering great customer service, backed by Highlight data and insight.
“We remove the need for service providers to increase staff or re-task staff, often needed when implementing new technology. Partners can hand over the optimisation of Highlight to our experts who will customise the monitoring, alerting and reporting to deliver exceptional value to both themselves and their customers. Service and account managers can then concentrate on managing and reporting on network and application performance rather than back-office administration, data collection, and SLA report building.”
As an example, Edmund outlines how a large retailer asked its network service provider for Highlight monitoring and reporting across its entire IT estate.
“Initially, the provider was delayed by its head office because it required that Highlight was added to its global product portfolio. Now with the new Managed Service offering, the local provider can deliver Highlight to the enterprise customer without delay by including it as a simple resell of a third-party professional service and appearing as a straight invoicing item. No need to productise Highlight or secure a political stamp of approval.”
Highlight Managed Services span a range of options. If a one-off professional service engagement is required, Highlight undertakes the full setup and once completed, the provider’s service management team takes control.
Alternatively, Highlight can offer manage the administration and configuration of features, leaving the service management team to focus on working with customers. If a full-service management consultancy role is needed, Highlight supplies the knowledge and expertise to deliver SLA and service performance reporting, working in partnership to recommend improvements to the customers’ networks, as well as taking over full day-to-day management of the Cloud platform.
Highlight is described as a fully configurable, performance monitoring, alerting, reporting service designed to benefit sales, service management, operations, and customers’ experience. It drives improvements in fault handling and resolution speed.
Knowing when and where infrastructure needs upgrading and having the evidence to support the capacity planning decisions is a game changer in true collaborative partnership, leading to operational excellence that enables issues to be treated before becoming critical.
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