Fisheye makes the case for managed services

Collaboration amongst specialists also encouraged

By Hamish Barwick, Auckland | Friday, 27 August 2010
Resellers should ditch the traditional service model if they want to retain customers and improve productivity, says Fisheye managing director Jeremy Hunt.

The Auckland-based HP reseller and Microsoft partner offers business IT support, mobile office support, unified communications and hosted services.

Speaking at a series of managed services roundtables sponsored by Kaseya in August, Hunt says his company has increased its customer base by at least 10 percent and cut down travelling time by using the remote management model.

“Customers have lived in that [traditional] IT world and haven’t been happy with the fact that they have to pay [for repairs] and then pay again if it breaks. The big driver for us is having happier customers that know what they are up for.”

Hunt says the company has been on a drive toward sustainability since 2000 and part of this was decreasing the time staff spent travelling.

“The incentive for us is to fix people’s computers remotely, because if we fix them we’re more profitable than the old style of charging as you go.”

As a privately held company, Fisheye does not issue profit results, but Hunt says it has experienced year-on-year growth of 15 percent. It has also recruited two staff to take total numbers to eight, and has more staff in sales than in technical roles now.