Acma Improves Service Efficiency With Kaseya VSA

As mobility and convergence erase geographical boundaries, the managed services market is gaining traction. Acma computers has been active in the managed services space for close to 15 years. As an endeavour to provide its customers round-the-clock and timely service, the company decided to deploy Kaseya’s Virtual System Administrator (VSA).

The Need

Biren Selarka, director, Acma computers, says, “Acma is a company, which started almost 15 years ago. We started our operations with computer assembling and computer services as the core business activity. Subsequently, our focus increased on services and that is currently our main line of business.”

Girish Krishnamurthy, MD-India, Kaseya, says, “Acma wanted to reduce its problems pertaining to customer service. For this, they wanted to take a proactive approach to bringing down the number of issues that were being faced, in addition to increasing the efficiency of the number of systems being managed by a single engineer. Acma was looking at a solution that would allow for a highly secure environment where they could remotely connect with their customers.”

Why Kaseya’s VSA?

Kaseya’s virtual system administrator seemed to be the apt choice as it gave Acma’s clients a secure way of communicating after adopting an approach that was proactive, all the while increasing the efficiency of the systems.

According to Selarka, the need actually was from the customer angle, where Acma was providing break-fix services in the initial phase, but as time progressed, the client started asking for a plethora of managed services including WAN and LAN infrastructure. “To be able to cater to these demands, we had two options. We could either provide manpower on site or we could provide a virtual system administrator, where using the technology a client starts seeing the benefits and moves on to using it in a much more effective way,” he explains.

VSA has a bounty of offerings including desktop management, software management, spyware protection and removal, virus protection, disk drive analysis, asset management, system auditing, and BCP and DR. It’s a single tool with multiple benefits that also allows management of WAN and network devices.

Initial Hiccups Required Hand Holding

Though no major challenges were faced pertaining to integration, Acma did require a little handholding in the initial implementation phase.

Selarka says, “The initial implementation needed a lot of hand-holding and training as it was a new technology, not just for the IT department but also for customers. When the whole user-base is using it, they need to be adequately trained in terms of registering a ticket, registering a complaint and getting the work done.”

He further adds, “When we talk about challenges and how the managed services version helped in overcoming these challenges, it’s quite a beautiful story that we faced with one of our clients, who had more than 300 desktops and they wanted a common policy implementation across their company for the various systems being used. Restraints included usage of Internet, data protection and so on. The policy had to be implemented within a short span of time. In such a situation, the client had two options – manually going to each machine and implementing the policy and in this case, if the user made any changes after the implementation, the company would never come to know. The second option was using the VSA, where the policy got implemented from a central location and also, if the user makes any changes, an immediate alert is sent to the IT manager. There is also an ongoing maintenance of the implemented policy resulting in time and cost savings for the organisation.”

A Snug Fit

For Acma, the VSA was almost close to a boon with its wide range of functionalities, from IT management to monitoring and auditing; it definitely was a snug fit.

Acma’s clients started benefiting in terms of reduction in IT costs, which in turn saved costs for Acma as well. On the customer front, the main benefit was seen in terms of reduction in downtime. Selarka says, “Moving from a reactive to a proactive approach is a major change for any IT infrastructure. Whenever there is a problem, the instant reaction is to do something about it, but here we are talking about proactively reducing the number of problems or complaints.”

With its plethora of features, it is no surprise that the virtual system administrator helped Acma’s clients in slashing costs in addition to saving time. With this implementation, Acma’s clients now have the flexibility to be proactive as opposed to earlier, when they had to make do with a reactive approach.