IBM Helps Growing Businesses Expand Global Technology Support

IBM
Corporation provides SMBs with the ability to offer global technology
support to their customers, regardless of their location.

As the imperative for businesses to expand into global markets continues, IBM
provides them with single-source technical support services for a fraction of
the cost of maintaining in-house skills or multiple regional service contracts.

IBM’s new Managed Vendor Support Services
gives clients the opportunity to scale their technical support offerings
globally-at their own pace – via access to IBM’s global reach, technical professionals, worldwide parts network and logistics expertise.

More
than just cost cutting, the new service helps growing companies calibrate the
technical support needed by their customers in specific locations around the
world and adjust the technical support model required. For example, SMBs ranging
from retail operations, to electronic game manufacturers to medical device
providers can now cater to their customers’ technical support needs around the
globe.

Riverbed Technology, Inc., a company specializing
in IT performance solutions, approached IBM after going public
in 2006 to help with its technical support and customer service offerings in
order to remain competitive. The Riverbed technical support team collaborated
with IBM’s field service organization to deliver on-site services that
minimized system downtime for customers. As a result, Riverbed has improved the
performance of their customers’ applications and network access to their data,
while increasing transmission speeds by 5 to 50 times and in some cases up to
100 times.

"By
working with IBM, Riverbed is able to optimize solutions for our customers to
increase the value of their existing IT infrastructure and the performance of
their mission-critical applications," said Scott Downie, SVP of WW support,
Riverbed. "IBM gave us the
opportunity to focus on IT innovation, and helped us liberate businesses from
common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling
consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application
visibility-all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or
servers."

The MVSS services brings a
technical support capability to clients and their wordwide customers, including
call-center support, customer problem resolution and engineering support,
onsite services, as well as parts inventory management, stocking and delivery.

"Through
the expansion of Managed Vendor Support Services, IBM can help businesses of
all sizes meet service level expectations and act as a trusted IT advisor,"
said Juhi Jotwani, VP, multi-vendor services, technical support service. "As a result, companies don’t have to spend
their time coordinating technical support services. And a single focal point
may help to hasten recovery from, and potentially prevent the occurrence of
outages."

With 30 years of post-sales technical support
experience-and thousands of certified professionals who offer services in 209
countries covering 127 languages-IBM can support clients’ global coverage needs
while helping to mitigate risks and enhance business efficiency. Moreover, by
leveraging IBM’s skilled personnel, businesses can save the time
and cost of hiring, training or retaining staff to support expanding business
opportunities or new products.