Avid and your Managed Service Provider

By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications.

You should have two technology foundations for your business: Avid Communications and an excellent IT organization. For larger companies, the IT support is often largely in-house. But most businesses rely on a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to handle a fairly wide variety of IT functions.

We at Avid know most of the MSPs in town and work with them on a daily basis. For many network providers, this relationship can be distant… or even adversarial. But that’s not the way we play it at Avid. For us, the closer the partnership, the better life is for everyone, especially for you, the client.

Here are specific things that we do to make the relationship function smoothly:

• We make it easy for MSPs to reach the technical support they need 24×7.
• Clients are allowed to designate MSPs as authorized representatives for some or all of the following: moves/adds/changes, billing inquiries, firewall changes, and other network changes. We keep detailed records to make sure MSP information is up to date and available to Avid’s technical support staff at all times.
• We engage in joint troubleshooting to zero in on problems very quickly.
• Our team deploys, monitors and maintains next-generation firewalls and managed network switches that meet the requirements established by MSPs for their clients.
• We design and deploy sophisticated networks in support of MSP objectives for a wide variety of their client objectives, including cloud-based applications and 100% network availability.

All of this is possible because of our intense local presence and both our Network Operations Center and field technical staff. Service providers lacking this are reduced to providing very limited support via distant call centers–making the life of MSPs difficult as they attempt to reach knowledgeable technical staff or are forced to engage in finger pointing with another provider.

There is simply no substitute for a cooperative and professional relationship between Avid and your MSP.