* With an eye on process improvements, global investment firm turns from one managed service provider to another
Sometimes, a little too much personality can creep into a managed services provider relationship. Just ask David Roth, managing director, IT, at The Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm in Washington, D.C.
Roth recently switched from a domestic MSP with which it had a long-running relationship to an offshore provider, MindTree. As of last month, MindTree has been using its mWatch managed services platform to provide IT infrastructure management and support services for Carlyle’s global data centers and more, Roth says.
Previously, Carlyle received managed IT services from SevenSpace, a Sun Microsystem’s property now under Oracle’s purview. The people focus was one of the primary reasons Roth decided to scout around for new MSPs when the SevenSpace contract expired last month, he says.
“The SevenSpace people served as an extension to our organization, which meant the relationship was all personality driven. We wanted to move to more of a process-oriented relationship, to comply with ITIL policies and procedures and be SLA driven,” Roth says.
Narrowing its choice from five providers, Carlyle selected MindTree based on its comfort level with the company’s technical capabilities, willingness to agree to SLAs, pricing and “its overall thoroughness of response to our request for proposals, our belief that it could meet the requirements that we set forth, and that there would be a good cultural fit,” Roth says.On the technical side, MindTree’s tools for configuration, change and service management were selling points, Roth says.
“They’re very graphically oriented, so we could group services for an application and define the relationship between them and see it visually — we really wanted a company that could show us servers grouped logically,” he says.
MindTree is monitoring and managing all of Carlyle’s IT production servers, about 300 total, hosted at data centers in the United States, United Kingdom and Hong Kong, as well as file servers running at each of the firm’s 30 offices worldwide. In addition, Roth says, MindTree is watching over other classes of hardware, including its WAN application acceleration devices, and applications. MindTree, for example, is managing Carlyle’s e-mail, e-mail archiving and mobile applications.
While still early days, Roth says he likes what it sees of the relationship. “The knowledge transfer has worked well, and we seem to have a good relationship in place. We were interested in being able to reach out to experts in Bangalore and discuss problems, issues and best practices, and that’s working out well,” he explains.
And, Roth notes, he’s eager to work further with MindTree. “It was the only vendor that talked to us about continual improvement, helping us find ways that can make us more efficient, increase stability, decrease call volumes, shrink our footprint. We were impressed.”
While not personality driven, a team spirit definitely exists, Roth adds. “It’s clear MindTree considers this relationship about more than SLAs and a contract.”
