Support Is What We Do

Support and maintenance accounts for around 40% of our turnover. In fact, 20% of our turnover is for support of systems that we didn't write.  We are uniquely specialised and highly experienced at learning and maintaining such systems, whether written in house or by third party suppliers.  We provide support of business critical systems to many of our high profile clients such as the National Trust, Teletext and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance.

Our Strengths
We provide excellent support based on our four key strengths:

1. Credibility
2. Infrastructure
3. Process to take over from existing support team
4. Financial Stability

Technology
We support all the technologies listed in our skills matrix and especially:

• Microsoft C#/.NET
• Microsoft ASP, ASP.NET, VB, VB.NET
• Borland Delphi (all versions) from our Delphi Centre of Excellence
• Databases including SQL Server
• Legacy technologies, especially legacy databases such as Paradox

Credibility
We satisfy our clients so much that we get 50% repeat business every year.  Our turnover was up 20% in 2005/06 and 32% in 2006/07.  Support is a key part of our strategy.  We have 35 clients with 60 systems in support, including all types of software, databases and websites.

Infrastructure
Having been doing it for 9 years we have built a mature infrastructure for support.   The most important aspect is our dedicated team of support professionals all of whom are developers, not helpdesk operatives only equipped to take messages.  Just like all our other staff they are graduates with at least five years experience and are cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau.  We invest heavily in their training to give them the breadth of expertise needed and ensure consistency for our clients.  We backup their expertise with a proven track record of taking over third party systems for numerous clients as well as supporting systems we wrote - our quality of service is the same regardless.  We also provide our online call logging software www.discoversupport.co.uk free of charge to enable clients to raise incidents, and track their progress online.

Our infrastructure means that we can offer guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs) for even the most business critical systems.  We offer tailored SLAs to deliver customised response and fix times up to 24×7 with ½ hour response time and guaranteed fix times.  In fact our average response time is 18 minutes across all client contracts, even those with 8+ hour response time SLAs!

We can work remotely from our offices or put dedicated staff onsite in client's offices.

Process
We provide all our services by applying engineering discipline and professionalism and support is no exception.  Our process for moving a system into our support team is the same whether it was written by our developers or by a third party.  We can learn a system to reliably support it with or without the help and advice of the original developers, and no matter what state the system is in - and with or without any original documentation.  We do this by:

1. Health Check.  In order to familiarise ourselves with the system we carry out a technical audit of it under the auspices of our health check service. The deliverable is a health check report giving our opinion of the code, database and technical documentation and covering any recommended remedial actions, plus any issues you highlight to us.
2. Familiarise Ourselves.  During the health check we familiarise ourselves, and produce a familiarisation document, allowing anyone in our team to read the summary and then pick up the application to support it.
3. Standardise Documentation.  We bring the documentation of the system up to our standards.
4. Implement Remedials.  Based on estimates the client decides whether to implement any of our recommended remedial actions.

This repeatable methodology is usually led by our Support Manager.  We give better support after the take on as a result of following the process.

Financial Stability / Longevity of Relationship
You will naturally be nervous about the financial viability of your chosen supplier of business critical support services.  We build very long term relationships with our clients and we have been trading successfully for 8 years and our results each year are within about 5% of business plan.  Our Finance Director has 40+ years experience of running his own businesses and thus we are not a 'dot com' but very stable.  Our largest 4 clients each contribute 10% to 15% of turnover and thus we are not at risk from any one of them.  We can supply whatever extra financial information you require for reassurance.

Our Contract will set out that upon payment in full you will get all intellectual property rights and copyright to the source code and database together with copies of the source code and database to protect you against us disappearing.  This is better than any escrow arrangement.

Pricing
We charge a daily retainer according to the required SLA, plus an agreed rate per call out.

Summary
MSM offer:

• lower risk take on
• proven quality support & SLA
• a fully managed service
• using specialists for each element
• trustworthiness

to be your strategic partner for the long term.  After all, support is what we do!

Download a PDF about our discoversupport services.