Is Most IT Really Corrupt?
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@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
This was an interesting read. I had never really given any thought to corruption in IT beyond the faking it idea. I sure as heck wouldn't feel comfortable working somewhere and not knowing what I'm doing and not even making an effort to learn.
And yet, it's so common that people no longer even realize it is something to question!
As long as you know how to learn quickly this one is often over-rated. It's the guys who NEVER learn what their job is (20 years in, having the SE come in once a week and make changes to network for them in exchange for buying enterysys switches) where it's out of hand.
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@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
This was an interesting read. I had never really given any thought to corruption in IT beyond the faking it idea. I sure as heck wouldn't feel comfortable working somewhere and not knowing what I'm doing and not even making an effort to learn.
And yet, it's so common that people no longer even realize it is something to question!
As long as you know how to learn quickly this one is often over-rated. It's the guys who NEVER learn what their job is (20 years in, having the SE come in once a week and make changes to network for them in exchange for buying enterysys switches) where it's out of hand.
Your quote is broken, Scott didn't say the first paragraph.
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@storageninja I'm saying that if there were enough good MSPs, I would agree with you. But there simply aren't enough of them, which means many of the realistic options for MSPs for most organizations aren't much if any better than the lousy SMB IT Scott's been talking about for a while. Reality doesn't realize a world where good MSPs are available to everyone in practical terms. The good MSPs aren't large enough, plentiful enough, or spread out well enough to service the vast majority of organizations that need good IT services is how it seems to work out ultimately. That's the reason there is so much meh or even poor IT going on, imo.
SMBs can't replace people as easily as Enterprises, because most of the best talent is gone before they can get to them. We've kind of already covered that that is the case just a few posts ago. Further, while their technical needs aren't as expansive as those of Enterprises, they require a LOT more variety of their staff on the average than an Enterprise will. SMBs Need generalists, because they don't have the scale of an Enterprise that can/will chop up as much of the tasks in their environments as they can into specialized roles.
It's absolutely correct to state that honesty and technical skill aren't in any way mutually dependent, but they are both required in both Enterprise and SMB settings to different degrees. SMBs have less internal oversight because they frankly typically don't have the time and resources of Enterprises to mitigate the effects of people sucking at being good people. The trust requirements of SMBs seems to generally be higher than for Enterprise where they can build safeguards into everything, and then have safeguards for their safeguards, etc. The problem is getting that much trust in someone who is also competent enough to get the job done. It's most certainly not a simple endeavor, or SMBs would have a much easier time doing it consistently. The problem is, as Scott seems to have suggested, that SMB needs are often pretty generic and interchangeable... and yet the best solution is to hire an entire firm of specialists and pay the price for an organization full of specialists for generic and interchangeable needs? what?
Sure SMB needs aren't generally that complicated, and yet there are still countless organizations who seem to struggle to secure good outside IT services. There's a gap between the tangibility of service availability from good MSPs to most organizations, and what most organizations can actually see is available. Plus, as this thread is addressing, the people factor makes things far more complicated when there are all sorts of individuals who are happy to participate in shady dealings for their own benefit. The problem is and always has been people, and it will continue to be in all likelihood.
Most people aren't cut out for IT, and I don't even necessarily mean from a technical perspective. The level of trust required for IT to be good is just not something that some people are able to handle well. Then add on the technical skills and expertise required, and the type of thinking required and there just aren't that many people left who are well suited for the job once we get to the end of the assessment. MSPs are a stopgap for that, since they can as Scott said: mitigate those things and hire more specialists to do a better job. However, if as you suggested Storageninja, most SMBs have pretty basic needs.. why would they need specialists once their systems are set up? It doesn't take a specialist to maintain a basic system, it's not that complicated right?
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@storageninja I'm saying that if there were enough good MSPs, I would agree with you. But there simply aren't enough of them, which means many of the realistic options for MSPs for most organizations aren't much if any better than the lousy SMB IT Scott's been talking about for a while. Reality doesn't realize a world where good MSPs are available to everyone in practical terms. The good MSPs aren't large enough, plentiful enough, or spread out well enough to service the vast majority of organizations that need good IT services is how it seems to work out ultimately. That's the reason there is so much meh or even poor IT going on, imo.
The highlighted portion shows the fault in this thinking. The reality is they probably do exist, but SMBs locality type thinking is what often prevents them from finding good solutions. IT is almost entirely done without people moving - i.e. it's done remotely. Now sure, those SMBs need bench support as well - they need someone to swap out printers, and an end user PC, etc, but those type jobs in SMB can be had for much less cost than good IT people.
A remote IT MSP can typically find a local source for bench work when needed, at probably half the cost of IT work. We have a company here in town where bench work was their specialty. Basically they had day laborers for this type of work.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
The problem is, as Scott seems to have suggested, that SMB needs are often pretty generic and interchangeable... and yet the best solution is to hire an entire firm of specialists and pay the price for an organization full of specialists for generic and interchangeable needs? what?
Yes, because as Scott already pointed out - it costs less. Using the numbers I provided, assuming you get cost the company $75K/yr, the MSP can do it for $50K or possibly less.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
The problem is, as Scott seems to have suggested, that SMB needs are often pretty generic and interchangeable... and yet the best solution is to hire an entire firm of specialists and pay the price for an organization full of specialists for generic and interchangeable needs? what?
This is called economies of scale. They aren't just doing this generic and interchangeable work for one customer they are doing it for hundreds of customers. The fact that it is specifically generic and interchangeable makes it easy to automate and manage a vast array of customers at a fraction the cost of in-house IT.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
Further, while their technical needs aren't as expansive as those of Enterprises, they require a LOT more variety of their staff on the average than an Enterprise will
I'm not convinced. I've worked in the SME space as well as the SMB space. You're expected to not only know your job but also the job of people "below" and "above" you. Is it slightly more specialized, sure, but it's also has a significant amount of variety and depth you wouldn't get in the SMB.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
However, if as you suggested Storageninja, most SMBs have pretty basic needs.. why would they need specialists once their systems are set up? It doesn't take a specialist to maintain a basic system, it's not that complicated right?
If this is correct, then it's even more important to use an MSP. Why, you probably ask - because if the MSP is spending even less time managing your stuff, then they can probably bill you even less than the previously stated $50K/yr. The company can then spend those funds instead on other things for their business. The other option is having an onsite IT person who job shares between many different things, several of which are non-IT and they could possibly pay someone less to do that work.
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@dashrender I'de like to know how MSPs can magically find people to do the same job (in this case, referring to bench-techs) for less money than an SMB can, just because they're MSPs. If they're dedicating an employee to an organization at the SMBs location, I don't see why there is any reason they can do anything cheaper than the SMB who can grab any joe local for the same cost at least.
How is a remote MSP going to find someone in a place they don't have any physical presence to pay a pittance to do bench work and have even the slightest inclination of getting anyone worthwhile? It's a very confusing notion, because it sounds kind of ridiculous. Lets hire a complete stranger in a place we've never been and do it cheaper than the local company who knows the area and the options available from the get-go. There's extremely few scenarios in which that's likely to work out that way except in extreme off-chances. Yeah, no. The local SMB already knows the going rates for bench work in the area, they know where to find local bench techs, and they already have access. Why would they look at what amounts to effectively a foreign entity without experience in their area to know their market, lol? You don't buy real estate that way, or pay for skilled tradesmen that way for most other things, so why is IT different somehow? The alternative for MSPs is to get a tech locally and try and move them, or get them to move on low pay which is either much more costly, or highly unlikely. There's really no way a remote MSP is likely to hire a local tech and move them on a local bench tech sort of pay grade to where an SMB is out of area and do it for a lower cost than a local SMB or MSP can hire local talent. Hiring a day laborer to do bench tech work is likely going to either cost more to pay another, local MSP to borrow a portion of their labor force, or it will involve hiring people they don't know and can't ensure they complete the work properly, resulting in a negative experience for the SMB with the MSP knowing that most folks working in IT aren't that good at it, so odds are very much in favor of that working out poorly.
Regarding a slew of specialists, the problem is that there are not that many situations in which the ratio will actually work out in reality the way folks keep suggesting. Why wouldn't in-house IT be able to automate the generic and interchangeable functions just like an MSP does? Specialization isn't required, so there's no need for specialists to do that as we've already covered, right? Or here's a better argument, why would an SMB have any desire or need to pay for a bunch of specialists continually when they can pay them for contract work to automate all of the generic stuff and pay a single generalist to handle the odds and ends? Is there some mistaken understanding about how SMBs need continuous tinkering with their systems like Enterprises? They don't. If say a dozen specialists can take 15 minutes a day to handle an environment, why can't a single generalist spend their week without the MSPs profit margin built in to do the same things along with some other things? We've already established there's basically no benefits provided to an SMB by specialists most of the time except debatably helpful efficiency to the cost of a profit margin for the MSP; so why should an SMB feel the need to pay for the MSP to make money off of the services they offer to an SMB if they can get the job done for less by employing a less skilled individual to handle the same routine tasks along with some others?
As far as job sharing, that's precisely why I said that SMBs require generalists. There will likely never be a time or place where SMBs don't need generalists (not just in IT), and an IT generalist is a cost-saving factor that no one who has posted here has seemed to enter into their calculations. If you try and consider SMBs in Enterprise terms, you're quite likely doing it wrong, because SMBs aren't generally like that until they reach a certain size. They're entirely different types of entities whose similarities largely end at the point where you acknowledge that they are businesses of different scale. You can't run an SMB like an Enterprise, because SMBs don't possess the scale to staff like an Enterprise. It's extremely rare in most fields that it is cheaper to hire a contractor than it is to utilize your own staff. The cost-savings only ever comes when expertise is required, or regulation requires typically. The on-staff IT in an SMB is probably not only doing IT, you're correct. That is precisely why the MSP saves money argument is wonky, because it fails to account for the other tasks that that in-house IT staff does in addition to the basic management and maintenance of the environment. Sure, one can make the argument that the IT staff may not be adequately managing the environment... but it's a may, not a will or a must. It's also entirely possible that they're bringing lots of added value over an MSP by doing other tasks that an MSP won't do at all, or will only do for added, cumulative costs that simply don't exist with on-site staff.
My organization would still need a security officer, and that security officer wouldn't be as good if they weren't also involved in/with IT. Paying an MSP for that wouldn't provide them what they get out of me for instance, even if they offered such a service at all, because I'm filling 2-3 different but related roles. Paying for part of three separate people's salary for one persons' job isn't necessarily going to mean saving any money. We actually have historically had exceptionally inexpensive MSP service offers just for technical services that were comparable to what my SMB offered me when they were deciding between on-site IT and MSPs. Most of the particularly "good" MSPs anywhere near us would not even come close to the other MSP offers we had or the organization's cost for me. Even though the MSPs were technically very capable, they wanted to do all sorts of things that were unnecessary for my organization that would make them immensely more expensive. Likewise, the cost even for the least expensive local MSP we could find to put a bench tech on-site was only slightly lower than doing it ourselves after benefits.. but we could have that bench tech do all sorts of other things that an MSP employee would not, so we get significantly increased value for only a minor cost hit.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender I'de like to know how MSPs can magically find people to do the same job (in this case, referring to bench-techs) for less money than an SMB can, just because they're MSPs. If they're dedicating an employee to an organization at the SMBs location, I don't see why there is any reason they can do anything cheaper than the SMB who can grab any joe local for the same cost at least.
How is a remote MSP going to find someone in a place they don't have any physical presence to pay a pittance to do bench work and have even the slightest inclination of getting anyone worthwhile? It's a very confusing notion, because it sounds kind of ridiculous. Lets hire a complete stranger in a place we've never been and do it cheaper than the local company who knows the area and the options available from the get-go. There's extremely few scenarios in which that's likely to work out that way except in extreme off-chances. Yeah, no. The local SMB already knows the going rates for bench work in the area, they know where to find local bench techs, and they already have access. Why would they look at what amounts to effectively a foreign entity without experience in their area to know their market, lol? You don't buy real estate that way, or pay for skilled tradesmen that way for most other things, so why is IT different somehow? The alternative for MSPs is to get a tech locally and try and move them, or get them to move on low pay which is either much more costly, or highly unlikely. There's really no way a remote MSP is likely to hire a local tech and move them on a local bench tech sort of pay grade to where an SMB is out of area and do it for a lower cost than a local SMB or MSP can hire local talent. Hiring a day laborer to do bench tech work is likely going to either cost more to pay another, local MSP to borrow a portion of their labor force, or it will involve hiring people they don't know and can't ensure they complete the work properly, resulting in a negative experience for the SMB with the MSP knowing that most folks working in IT aren't that good at it, so odds are very much in favor of that working out poorly.
What work do you think this bench tech will be doing? I look at my company and know that anyone here in a non tech job can connect a PC to the needed connections if it needs to be replaced. Anyone here can replace a monitor. Anyone here can replace a toner cartridge, paper in a printer, label printer roles.
Beyond that we do we have left - switches/servers (really - these should be hosted in most cases)/access points.
My printers are all handled by support contracts with a printer company. And there are spare parts setup as needed for the rest of the daily equipment.
Switches/server/APs fail so rarely, that when it does fail, you just pony up the cost for the local person to deal with.
But back to those other few things - label makers, camera on a PC, scanners - these are all replaced by the non IT staff and mailed off to be repaired elsewhere. Unless you employ a lot of really expensive staff, you just saved the cost of most bench work (not completely of course because those internal staff do still get paid, and they are now your bench staff).
I'm just not sure what day to day things you think need to be solved by an onsite person?
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@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
Anyone here can replace a toner cartridge, paper in a printer, label printer roles.
Rub it in
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@wirestyle22 said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
Anyone here can replace a toner cartridge, paper in a printer, label printer roles.
Rub it in
lol, you know they can there as well - your management has made them not have to. And there's nothing wrong with that. Perhaps those people are making the company enough money that it's not worth their time to change the toners - it's more cost effective for the bench group to do it.
Of course you're in government - so they are just inefficient.
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@tirendir Two questions:
- How old are you?
- How long have you worked at your current job?
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
Regarding a slew of specialists, the problem is that there are not that many situations in which the ratio will actually work out in reality the way folks keep suggesting. Why wouldn't in-house IT be able to automate the generic and interchangeable functions just like an MSP does? Specialization isn't required, so there's no need for specialists to do that as we've already covered, right? Or here's a better argument, why would an SMB have any desire or need to pay for a bunch of specialists continually when they can pay them for contract work to automate all of the generic stuff and pay a single generalist to handle the odds and ends? Is there some mistaken understanding about how SMBs need continuous tinkering with their systems like Enterprises? They don't. If say a dozen specialists can take 15 minutes a day to handle an environment, why can't a single generalist spend their week without the MSPs profit margin built in to do the same things along with some other things? We've already established there's basically no benefits provided to an SMB by specialists most of the time except debatably helpful efficiency to the cost of a profit margin for the MSP; so why should an SMB feel the need to pay for the MSP to make money off of the services they offer to an SMB if they can get the job done for less by employing a less skilled individual to handle the same routine tasks along with some others?
You've lost me here. We already said that you're getting paid $50K/yr and after benefits you cost the company close to $75K/yr.
Then we showed that the MSP could likely get the job done for only $50K to the company (that includes the bench time FYI) saving the company $25K/yr.Now you're saying you can find an onsite person to do the job for what? $35K and after benefits they cost $50K so they are back to parity? Which still means the local guy loses because of the bus situation - what is that one guy gets hit by a bus? What if he wants to go on vacation?
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
As far as job sharing, that's precisely why I said that SMBs require generalists. There will likely never be a time or place where SMBs don't need generalists (not just in IT), and an IT generalist is a cost-saving factor that no one who has posted here has seemed to enter into their calculations. If you try and consider SMBs in Enterprise terms, you're quite likely doing it wrong, because SMBs aren't generally like that until they reach a certain size. They're entirely different types of entities whose similarities largely end at the point where you acknowledge that they are businesses of different scale. You can't run an SMB like an Enterprise, because SMBs don't possess the scale to staff like an Enterprise. It's extremely rare in most fields that it is cheaper to hire a contractor than it is to utilize your own staff. The cost-savings only ever comes when expertise is required, or regulation requires typically. The on-staff IT in an SMB is probably not only doing IT, you're correct. That is precisely why the MSP saves money argument is wonky, because it fails to account for the other tasks that that in-house IT staff does in addition to the basic management and maintenance of the environment. Sure, one can make the argument that the IT staff may not be adequately managing the environment... but it's a may, not a will or a must. It's also entirely possible that they're bringing lots of added value over an MSP by doing other tasks that an MSP won't do at all, or will only do for added, cumulative costs that simply don't exist with on-site staff.
Of course this is true - but it's now likely that you are over or under paying that person for these other non IT jobs. It's extremely unlikely that a person is clocking out when done with IT work at wage X and then clocking in at wage y when they are doing non IT things.
This is where the company can either come out ahead or behind.
So we have two situations, the over and the under paid - there's always the potential for parity pay, but that really seems pretty unlikely based on skill sets.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
My organization would still need a security officer, and that security officer wouldn't be as good if they weren't also involved in/with IT. Paying an MSP for that wouldn't provide them what they get out of me for instance, even if they offered such a service at all, because I'm filling 2-3 different but related roles. Paying for part of three separate people's salary for one persons' job isn't necessarily going to mean saving any money. We actually have historically had exceptionally inexpensive MSP service offers just for technical services that were comparable to what my SMB offered me when they were deciding between on-site IT and MSPs. Most of the particularly "good" MSPs anywhere near us would not even come close to the other MSP offers we had or the organization's cost for me. Even though the MSPs were technically very capable, they wanted to do all sorts of things that were unnecessary for my organization that would make them immensely more expensive. Likewise, the cost even for the least expensive local MSP we could find to put a bench tech on-site was only slightly lower than doing it ourselves after benefits.. but we could have that bench tech do all sorts of other things that an MSP employee would not, so we get significantly increased value for only a minor cost hit.
The question is - could the company get better results from experts from the MSP than they can from you? I don't know you, so I can't say. But is it possible, absolutely it's possible.
One of the things here is not to simply look at cost savings, but cost parity. If the company gets all the same work done at a higher quality at the same cost, that's a win.
Please understand this is not an attack on you.
But it's extremely likely that in many if not most cases that the experts at the MSP could/would achieve better results for the company than a generalist can/does locally.
Let's take your Security Officer role for example. Someone who is highly knowledgeable in this specific field is likely able to do things faster and more detailed than a generalist who has to split their attention over 5+ different jobs. -
@dashrender In my mind, a bench tech actually does tech work. Like troubleshooting issues that can't be done remotely, like a workstation that won't boot. You're not troubleshooting that from a few hundred miles away very well lol, someone has to put hands on that to do anything with it. It's difficult to maintain cost effectiveness except in particularly good SMBs with multiple spares sitting on site, and it takes more time to do a workstation swap managed by a clueless user versus a legitimate technician of just about any level. If they have any issues at all, it's burning vastly more expensive MSP time at over $100/hour minimum for direct support that isn't covered in a contract.
In my agency, we have about 40 printers on desks, and we buy them because it was enormously expensive to try and pay for those to be supported (though our large multi-functions are all rented and contracted for support from a printer company). Sure the users can change paper and cartridges themselves.. and that's about it though, lol. They don't understand enough about printers to troubleshoot them (it's not their job, which I can understand to a point). Outside of IT, there are exactly zero people in my organization that would be remotely comfortable disassembling part of a printer to replace parts. Desk printers suck, and they're tedious as hell to support, or expensive as hell in our experience. Certainly not necessary in many organizations, but even without highly paid staff, it's just WAY too expensive to try and funnel that much printing through a few big printers.
Also, I'm early 30s and I've been at my current org for about five years @Wirestyle22.
For me, benefits don't cost us anywhere remotely close to 25K/yr, it's more like 15K/yr. My organization was paying about 60k/yr rate for maintenance and management of the entire environment between my predecessor and when I was employed, and that was the best option available from any MSP within 150 miles. The month I started, we had a major server failure (host failure) that nearly shut the company down for a full week and change. We quoted costs for having MSPs help us, it was (at the time) almost a full year's pay for me to pay for the least expensive MSP offer we got to resolve one major failure. It turns out, there were far better MSPs available, and they all cost substantially more to contract than what I'm paid to do what I do, and our cost savings are still much greater yet for MSPs to do what I have from a project standpoint in rebuilding the entirety of our IT infrastructure over the past few years.
My organization still requires a security officer (I'de argue that honestly, most SMBs past a very small size really should have some sort of security post of some form or other), so they would need to pay like 80%-100% of my salary to someone regardless.. but we as an SMB save about 10K-20K per year on IT after hiring a second individual for our internal IT by not hiring an MSP. The MSP argument only makes obvious sense if you ignore all the other roles that IT makes sense to do in an SMB. Reality often doesn't bare that kind of division of roles and responsibilities out well, so it's kind of a theoretical benefit in many cases. That however, isn't to say that I don't agree that a lot of SMBs really should be contracting out all of their IT, my argument from the beginning has been that it's just bad advice to suggest that Every SMB should contract an MSP because it's cheaper/better etc., because it quite simply isn't the case. Being an exception to the norm helps make that more apparent of course, and I realize I'm an exception in a myriad of ways. I realize though that I'm far from the only one, and my issue is only really with the argument using the word "always".
If my organization could get better benefits from an MSP, it's the MSPs fault for not making themselves easily accessible enough for my organization to detect them. I doubt there are or would be many that could offer nearly the value they receive from me, but I'm certain some MSPs might be capable of offering superior results in some ways... but at how much greater cost? We've basically spent about 340k to manage and administer the environment for about five years, while replacing and upgrading everything from top to bottom (literally, all the things) for about 50 employees including the physical hosts, server software, switches, wiring, phone system, all workstations, our entire environment's implementation as well as how and with what we do our security. There are few MSPs using what we do at my organization, which is fine. However, they're taking advice from me more often than the opposite where I am. Again, I realize I'm very much an anomaly though.
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
it's just WAY too expensive to try and funnel that much printing through a few big printers.
What? How is it more expensive to use fewer larger more efficient/less cost per page printers than putting a printer on every desk?
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@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
The month I started, we had a major server failure (host failure) that nearly shut the company down for a full week and change. We quoted costs for having MSPs help us, it was (at the time) almost a full year's pay for me to pay for the least expensive MSP offer we got to resolve one major failure.
Holy cats, what was the issue? Let's assume the MSP wanted $150/hr, you mentioned the previous MSP cost the company $60K for a year, so we'll use that for the yearly cost.... The MSP said it would take 400 man hours to fix your server? Something seems really wrong with that number.
Also - I'm wondering, did you look for an ITSP (hourly consultant) to work on the server instead of a long term contract MSP to fix it? Also - did the fix include new hardware that was needed regardless? If so, that money doesn't count in the cost. And lastly - what did you end doing to fix it?
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@dashrender Time costs money, and forcing 40 people to two or three printers costs a LOT of time when they're only printing five or six pages each, and they're all different pages for difference cases etc.. It's a time cost problem, not an ink or toner cost problem.
