Why Tegen chose Blue Solutions to help them grow their IT services business
Client profile
Tegen (www.tegen.co.uk) is a UK-based, ISO20000-certified IT solutions company, specialising in Cloud, managed, and other services, as well as outsourced IT support and consultancy. Founded in 2002, the company has an established track record of serving customers in multiple verticals, ranging from retail to engineering.
The right choice of partners has been critical to the success of this model, and has fuelled the company’s rapid growth. It now operates a hybrid offering of managed services, ranging from on-premise servers to a wide range of cloud services across three data centres.
The challenge
By any standards, the range and depth of offerings that Tegen can deliver is impressive, ranging from networks, commnications, and IT support, to training, Cloud, and managed services.
But assembling a portfolio of different products and services from different vendors into reliable solutions, and finding an easy, rapid, and economical way to get them provisioned and delivered, can be a huge stumbling block for the service provider – and so for the end-user as well.
Tegen’s founder and Managing Director, Richard Smith, recounts some of the challenges that the company faced in providing solutions to their customers based around IT security and Cloud-based office applications, for example.
Firstly, he says, the security vendors’ solutions that he was investigating to secure his customers’ desktops, laptops, and mobile devices demonstrated not only significant efficiency issues, but also serious security flaws!
Secondly, the management tools, too, were poor – making the prospect of providing security as a managed service somewhat unworkable. This was a deal-breaker in a business that needs highly scaleable platforms to enable it to service a rapidly growing customer base.
But the challenges were not only technical or functional; they were procedural too. As Smith explains, the faster he can get a quote and raise a purchase order, the faster he can assemble a solution for his customers – but could he rely on partners to align their processes with Tegen’s newly-streamlined procurement system?
With Tegen’s sights set on large-scale Office 365 users, as well as on the security proposition, it was something of a worry. Plus, the prospect of having to manage complex vendor licensing scenarios was threatening to eat into precious margins!
The solution
Tegen chose Blue Solutions to deliver a solutions-based partnership that would extend far beyond the basic product and service specifics.
On the security front, Blue Solutions worked with Tegen to help them introduce the Trend Micro Worry Free managed business security brand to their customers. “Trend Micro ticked every box on our list,” said Smith. “The solutions from other vendors were either too intrusive or lacked the security features we needed.”
For office applications, Blue Solutions delivered a scaleable management and procurement platform for Office 365, from which Tegen could comfortably grow its customer base at lower cost, offering higher performance and flexible terms that they could then pass on to their customers.
But as Smith notes, the “intangible” qualities in the relationship were, in many ways, as important as the actual services and solutions delivered.
Blue Solutions’ willingness to align their back-end processes with Tegen’s new procurement systems, for example, has been instrumental in enabling Tegen to assemble solutions for customers rapidly and economically.
Blue Solutions, Smith continues, are “very proactive” and “not just box-shifters.” Instead, they also provide “excellent ongoing support and advice” for licensing needs, through account management teams that are “skilled, faultless, and knowledgeable.”
The results
There is no doubt that the relationship between Blue Solutions and Tegen has helped make it possible for Tegen to maintain both service quality and differentiation, and grow revenue, across a rapidly growing customer base, and in a crowded market.
“Satisfying our customers is our end goal”, says Smith, and, as just one example of how Blue Solutions has helped them to achieve this, he says that Tegen can now roll out new security policies to its customers “in minutes, rather than days.”
In fact, Blue Solutions have even worked with Tegen to jointly create customer proposals for complex licensing projects. This has resulted in something far more valuable than a simple sales relationship – namely, a “solution sell” in its most developed, most collaborative, most customer-centric form.
As Smith’s words in the title of this case study put it: “Phenomenal customer service, faultless account management!”
The key benefits
Thanks to its solutions-focused approach and its wide-reaching vendor relationships, Blue Solutions has enabled Tegen's business to:
- Reduce risk and cost to customers through effective managed security and low-cost Cloud office applications
- Deliver additional value to its customer base, by enabling them to easily onboard new services and pay for only what they use
- Increase ongoing revenue streams from customers' subscriptions to Cloud and managed services
- Differentiate its service offering in a crowded marketplace, thanks to its rapid provision of solutions that Blue Solutions worked consultatively with them and their customers to deliver
- Grow the business in line with Tegen's 100% target