Introduction to Wavex
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Wavex has been providing outsourced desktop
and network management support since 1998 and currently
supports a client base in excess of 3,000 desktops spread
over 180 customers. Wavex's customers operate in many industry
sectors including law firms, accounting practices and corporates.
Wavex's focus is primarily on network and desktop management,
and hardware and software support, however, Wavex also provides
a significant part of the IT value chain required by the
medium sized enterprise market from IT procurement, installation,
security, connectivity, remote access solutions and database
management, all aligned with the core IT support needs of
our customer base. Wavex offers a comprehensive service
relying on a mixture of remote support and assistance, together
with qualified on site support to provide total network
and desktop support.
Wavex is, and has been for the past six years, a Microsoft
Certified Partner. Wavex was the first company to identify
and write a fix for the 'I Love U' virus receiving recognition
in various newspapers and online sources. The systems developed
and utilised by us to provide support have been independently
recognised as leading edge network management and support
applications.
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How our services are different
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Rather than using support products widely available on the market,
Wavex designed processes and applications to provide the services
customers actually wanted. We spoke to our clients, we talked with
our engineers and spent a year listening; gathering reactions to
outsourcing of IT services from various companies and took the time
to understand how we can be better.
We then spent another two years developing our own solutions and
designing a service model based on excellence, response and communication
(in fact, we are always making improvements!). Quite unlike any
solutions currently available, they all had one focus in mind -
client needs.
- NETi
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"........ other network management packages can't
come close to it in terms of detail and speed " .
Network
Computing Magazine. |
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NETi was a first mile-stone, an application designed to allow
Wavex to support our clients without interrupting your business.
It's different because it's fast, allows us to solve problems
significantly quicker than other methods. This means that you
spend less money on support, you receive a better service and
lose less money through downtime. Network Computing wrote a highly
complementary two page article on NETi. Read
more
- Wavex Extranet
We realised our customers want us to be accountable and they want
to be informed. With a view to ensuring excellent service and
communication with our clients we developed the Wavex Extranet,
a web based portal which provides our customers details about
everything we've done, doing and are going to do. Wavex also does
all the 'number crunching' to provide you 'real time' information
on how well we are meeting our SLA.
It allows you to see what your IT support costs are actually being
spent on with a fully detailed invoicing history, all outstanding
and closed calls, individual support usage, training and general
IT recommendations as well as providing easy access to your email
and our monitoring solution (which we also wrote in-house) and
shows you a full audit of all your equipment. Read
more
- Wavex Workflow Database
After all of this development, we wanted to ensure that we had
back-end systems and processes which were highly honed to providing
excellent service. Our client base has expanded quickly and we
needed an application to help us manage our clients and our staff!
We needed a scalable call management system which could help
us manage our business. So, we went back to the drawing board
and developed WWS (the Wavex Workflow System).
In order to be a truly proactive IT outsourcing provider supporting
different clients with different requirements and networks,
we need to maintain a lot of technical information about our
clients networks and servers. The Wavex Workflow System maintains
all of the information we need in one place to resolve your
problems quickly, including site configuration, call history,
employee contacts, IT related supplier contacts for each client
are maintained and immediately accessible for managing work
flow processes. We have even integrated WAP access to our call
management system to ensure engineers arrive on site (when going
on site is necessary) ready to address all issues.
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Out of Hours Support
Wavex can also offer you 24 hours support, covering any time
difference with remote offices, or to continue to support your
staff while they work from home or abroad.
If you want to see more of these systems in operation, click
here for an on-line demo.
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The Wavex Extranet
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Wavex developed a comprehensive web based portal through
which customers can choose to manage their services including
logging helpdesk calls, reviewing real time server monitoring
and network status and general account management is handled.
Further areas of the Extranet provide customers with access
to their office email via the web and access to their office
desktop via a secure virtual private network (“VPN”).
The Extranet also provides customers additional means to raise
calls, even deciding on the period of time that elapses prior
to receiving an update.
Wavex also supports automatic sign-off. This is a procedure
that provides a number of individuals within a company with
the ability to decide if support calls should be allowed to
proceed. This provides customers with complete control over
their use of Wavex’s support services and costs.
A management section provides a range of real-time reports
which detail various aspects of customer’s use of Wavex’s
resources including reports like:-
- Resource Utilisation Report/ Support Hours
These reports show the allocation of support to various
individuals. This can help to identify uneconomic assets
or specific training needs of users. Also, details of pre-purchased
support hours can be viewed with the ability to purchase
additional hours on-line.
- Historical Support Usage
This report is designed to show how Wavex is reducing the
overall support spend. It provides details of the average
support used per week.
- Preventions
When a call is completed, an engineer will update it with
the details of the solution, the engineer will also state
whether the call could have been prevented. The preventative
measures may be training, updated infrastructure, etc. This
report provides a breakdown of cumulative support hours
which could have been prevented if certain steps had been
taken.
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See our Extranet for yourself
Username: demouser
Password: demouser
Click here |
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Where we are based
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Wavex are quickly building a network of national offices
for complete UK coverage. We currently have offices in several locations
with our head office in Covent Garden, London
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Support Costs
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On-line Calculator
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Wavex can offer either a "Variable" rate charge
structure or a fixed "All inclusive" rate. If you
would prefer, the initial cost structure can be variable and
you can then switch to fixed once you have a good understanding
of usage requirements and patterns. Travel is charged on a time
and costs basis only where your offices are located more than
½ hour away from one of our office locations around the
UK.
Variable Rate Costs
The cost of Wavex's Variable Rate services which enable clients
to effectively pay for what is used is as follows:
- £150.00 plus VAT per month for Wavex Service Fees
including hardware router and firewall (where required),
deployment of NETi remote network management software across
the whole of your network, remote access to emails*, access
to the Wavex Extranet.
- Server monitoring from £43.00 per month per server.
*For Microsoft Exchange users only.
Thereafter, we charge for our services on a time basis of
£85.00 per hour. Telephone and remote support is charged
in increments of 15 minutes and on site support charged in
increments of 30 minutes.
We are often asked, "how much will it really cost?"
For reference, the "industry average" support for
users is generally around 3 - 5 hours of support per user
per year, which means you can expect to pay around £255.00
- £340.00 per person on average per year. In reality,
some people use more time and some less depending on the quality
of their PC's and their general IT literacy.
Fixed Rate Costs
For clients seeking to cap their monthly support costs, Wavex
can offer an all-inclusive fee structure. We will establish
a monthly cost per PC/Server after reviewing your IT infrastructure
and discussing with you the nature of users queries and the
type of support required. For general reference, monthly charges
start from £55.00 per PC per month + VAT. This will
include unlimited use of the helpdesk for remote and on-site
support AND unlimited on-site support*
(certain exclusions apply). Server monitoring is charged separately.
*Certain activities like server rebuilds, work which
may be of a project nature or 'acts of god' i.e. office fire, coffee
spilt over a laptop, is excluded from the all-inclusive fee.
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Support Contracts
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We support many different clients and understand that every
business has unique requirements. As a result of this we
can offer various support options that best suit your IT
needs.
Our standard Support Contract gives you a guaranteed time
for us to respond to a request for support. The standard
is a 4 hour response although, if specified, this can be
lower for critical devices. Through the use of NETi, most
response and resolution times are within minutes and our
Extranet provides statistics to show this.
We are proactive in our approach to IT, which means we
can check backups, disks and disk space, ensuring that any
server errors are acted upon and general house keeping is
maintained.
Through the use of NETi and our other monitoring solutions
we are immediately informed should a problem occur.
Each support contract contains an SLA (Service Level Agreement)
which outlines the role and responsibilities of both parties. Click here to see an example
Having a support contract provides the following:-
- After the initial three month trial period, you may
terminate the contract with only three months notice.
- You receive a hardware firewall and a remote access
solution at no extra charge.
- We can monitor any item of your infrastructure.
- Service packs are implemented when agreed (not necessarily
on initial release by Microsoft).
- Standard software updates are applied.
- Our NETi product is provided at no extra charge.
- Virus scanners are kept up to date.
- Priority response compared to non-service contract customers.
- Access to Wavex's Extranet which provides access to
your office resources (email, desktop..) as well as on-line
invoice details, historical details of work carried out
as well as real-time reports to help reduce your IT costs.
- A replacement service for infrastructure (servers, PCs,
printers) can be held in case of system failure.
- Telephone, on-site and remote access support.
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Server Availability Monitoring Services
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Server Monitoring was developed to provide reactive and
proactive monitoring of server hardware and operating
system errors as well as checking external connectivity
to and from multiple networks:
Proactive Monitoring
Wavex's Proactive Server Monitoring application is a
lightweight service that runs on all managed servers.
It sends Wavex data containing the following information:
- Disk space - Ensuring there is adequate space remaining
on your drives
- And service status changes. If a critical service
stops, an alert is sent to the monitoring application.
- TCP/IP setup details. (Public IP address of site,
default gateway of site, server IP address)
- Current CPU and memory utilisation.
- Details of events from eventlogs. This information
is supported by a knowledgebase which further priorities
the events. Depending on the criticality, engineers
are automatically notified by email.
- Contents of window popups. This further increases
our response times to Dr. Watsons or other application
crashes which may only generate a desktop alert.
The application uses a lightweight UDP based protocol
to prevent any degregation of network performance even
if you have hundreds of servers running on your LAN.
It also provides extensive data manipulation allows cross
comparisons of problems across all servers. Ideal for
planned upgrades.
Reactive Monitoring
Wavex's Reactive Server Monitoring Services utilise a
highly customised Whats Up Gold, application to monitor
all the clients through a secure VPN. Wavex reactive monitoring:-
- Network availability - external/internet access monitoring
internet connectivity
- Service state - Up/down and availability measured
against third party Service Level Agreements
- Various TCP ports (SMTP, HTTP, FTP)
- SNMP can also be monitored to show traffic utilisation
- Web based reporting for live and historic analysis
and performance measurement.
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Wavex IT Management Matrix
For clients looking for a broad range of services performing
the complete functions of an internal IT team, Wavex offers
a fully Managed Service. Depending on the size of the organisation,
complexity of infrastructure and the level of need for on-site
hands-on support and planning, Wavex can offer the three
levels of IT support outlined below.
| Support
Levels |
Scope of
Responsibilities |
Function
Overview |
Wavex Solutions
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Level 3
Consultancy and
Planning
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IT Strategy, Policy
Management and Budgeting |
High level planning, business
focused
Management, controls and
security
Financial planning and prioritisation
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Consultancy services – Business
oriented needs assessment
Current infrastructure assessment
– Critical Systems Maintenance Review
Periodic review meetings
with business management to assess IT needs
and suitability of infrastructure to meet
business drivers
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Level 2
Senior Network
Administration
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Infrastructure
Management |
Implementation of IT strategy
Project management
Responsibility for service
levels and delivery of functionality of systems
according to business needs and budget
Third party ICT supplier
management
Data integrity and accessibility
(back-ups, file structure management)
Network access and remote
access services
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Wavex Dedicated Tier 2 engineer
or Senior Administrator on site – full or
part time depending on day to day needs
Wavex support for in-house
Tier 1 support if required
Infrastructure maintenance
on pre-defined scheduled maintenance supported
by on-site support when required
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Level 1
User Support
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Day to Day IT Support
Services |
Day to day support (user
queries and infrastructure support)
Proactive monitoring and
maintenance
Policy enforcement and monitoring
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Operation of a helpdesk for
telephone and remote Tier 1 support (user
support, day to day trouble shooting)
Proactive and Reactive monitoring
solutions for servers and connectivity
Wavex Dedicated Tier 1 engineer
or desktop support administrator
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Remote Working Solutions
| We recognised our clients growing need to work remotely
and still get access to their office emails and files. That's
why Wavex includes secure, encrypted VPN ("virtual
private network") access to your offices for selected
employees so files and all office services can be utilised
from anywhere in the world. In addition, Wavex also provides
remote access to emails via the Wavex Extranet (see
above).*
* Available to Microsoft Exchange users only
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Any questions? Let us call you back.
You can either fill in the below form and I'll call you back, or
you can call me on #phone#, just ask for #user#.
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