Have you heard your IT staff make any of the following comments?

• “We need to hire someone to take care of all this little stuff”
• “If I had someone to help me, then I could focus on activities that add value”
• “I’m buried in the urgent issues, and I can’t get to the important ones”

Although these statements are common to small and medium businesses (SMBs), they are symptomatic of problems that result in excess spending and lost opportunity. At the core of these statements are the following issues:

• IT is not aligned with, or focusing on strategic “value-add” activities
• Quantifiable IT metrics and key performance indicators (KPI’s) are not available or enforced
• IT functions unpredictably, reacting to problems in an ad-hoc manner.

Today many organizations spend valuable time on the mundane, repetitive maintenance of the massive systems they have come to rely on.

• Reviewing dozens of reports logs from servers, firewalls, Antivirus and Backup software.
• Managing the constant flow of hardware and software asset changes
• Identifying the need for, testing and deploying security patches and updates
• Testing disaster recovery procedures
• Repetitive distribution of known solutions to common problems

From a financial perspective, IT costs are equally unpredictable and difficult to associate with real value. While adding an additional employee would (in theory) increase the capacity of IT, the cost of additional head count is significant as shown below:

Full Time Employee vs. MSP Comprehensive

	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Recruitment Cost	$ 5,000
Salary (+ 3%/yr)	$ 45,000	$ 46,350	$ 47,741
Health Care ($800/mo + 18%/yr)	$ 9,600	$ 11,328	$ 13,367.04
401k (3%)	$ 1,350	$ 1,391	$ 1,432
Workers Comp	$ 40	$ 40	$ 40
Tax (20%)	$ 9,000	$ 9,270	$ 9,548
Training	$ 5,000	$ 2,500	$ 2,500
Computer, software	$ 5,000	$ 500	$ 500
Desk Space	$ 2,000
Total FTE Costs	$ 81,990	$ 153,369	$ 228,496
Total MSP Costs	$ 78,000	$ 102,000	$ 135,000
MSP Savings	$ 3,990	$ 51,369	$ 93,496

For these reasons and others, many organizations are considering managed service providers like Thinsolutions. In Cleveland, Ohio, and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, Florida, Thinsolutions has become the premier Managed IT Services and Consulting Company delivering world-class IT infrastructure solutions to small and medium sized organizations. In addition to remotely monitoring and managing networks on a subscription basis, Thinsolutions offers IT infrastructure consulting, application hosting, web hosting, and IT staff augmentation. Thinsolutions focuses on operational efficiency, helping clients achieve their core organizational objectives.

	FTE	MSP
Skill Set	A single skill set is required to perform many functions. You need to pay to add more skills.	Thinsolutions account managers select the technical consultant from our team with the advanced skill set that corresponds to a specific situation. Thinsolutions invests in advanced training for all technical consultants.
Experience	Several years experience, grows in real-time	Pool of 100+years combined experience, grows exponentially as Thinsolutions does.
Scalability	Limited to a single task in one location	Thinsolutions can call upon all their resources to resolve a single critical or complex issue, or deploy staff across the country to cover multiple locations simultaneously.
Cost	Higher costs will only increase. Difficult to quantify the value of soft costs like healthcare.	Lower, predictable costs

In addition to lower cost and flexible capacity benefits, Thinsolutions MSP also offers the following benefits:

• Peace of Mind - that seasoned professionals are using advanced tools to predict and prevent any risk as soon as it is visible.
• Increased Productivity - because key network elements are more reliable and available.
• Faster & cheaper issue resolution - because we notify our technical consultants in real-time, with the exact location and cause of a current or developing problem.
• Reduced time spent on maintenance - using automation, we manage the exceptions to a library of internationally accepted standards, so you can focus on your core.
• Predictable lower costs - we take the bite out of IT planning and execution.