The decision of whether to self-manage or use third party IT Services has been a source of conflict for many technology executives. However, recent technological advances have cleared up this conflict as many companies now see outsourcing IT infrastructure as a method of lowering their IT expenses. Using ComTech as your third party to manage your infrastructure, will not only save you nearly 50% of your overall IT cost, but will also cut down on over 45% of your lag in productivity caused by down time.

     We will present a case study of a typical small to medium size business having 40 user workstations, three servers (one mail server, one database server and one file/print server), one firewall, one router, two switches and one network printer. The examples below show the cost difference by self-management versus using as a third party:

Self-managed:

     Consider a case in which you decide to manage your IT network by hiring your own full-time staff which is comprised of a network or IT administrator.
It will cost you between $40,000 and $60,000 depending on your location and the local labor rates. For this example, we will fix this cost at an average of $45,000. Additional costs for staff including benefits, sick and vacation days plus 7.5% payroll tax is about $12,975. Your staff training on the management software would cost you about $2,500. Your total cost will be approximately $60,475 annually. Furthermore, you will need to purchase an IT management system and required hardware for a cost of approximately $10,000. The annual figure of $60,475 is based on the assumption that you have a perfect IT environment with NO problems and NO down time.

Using ComTech as a Third Party:

     With ActiveCare, we will take the headache out of managing and troubleshooting your computers, allowing you to focus on your business, not on your IT infrastructure. Our goal is to provide complete IT asset life cycle management, maximize system up time and minimize time to resolve issues whenever they occur. Our full services option provides comprehensive services and preventive maintenance for workstations, servers, networks, and databases. We will proactively monitor your servers, manage your mail server and database server and carry out preventive maintenance on your workstations along with maintaining network devices for optimal performance. End-users will be able to call our toll-free number and talk to our experienced help desk staff about any problems they may be experiencing in their day-to-day computer operations.

     In addition, you can choose the workstation preventive maintenance plan and monitoring option to match your budget if the full service portfolio goes beyond your budget requirements. For purposes of our example, we will use the full service option for a 40-user Workstation environment: Our charges for full services are $39 per month per workstation, $99 per month per server, $25 per month for router, $60 per month per firewall, $9 per networked printer, and $9 per month switch aggregating our total annual charges to $23,628. This provides an annual savings of $36,847 over the self-managed example above ($60,475 - $23,628).