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Gaeltek on Autotask: "Can't Live Without It"
BEFORE AUTOTASK
- Did not have time to seek out new clients
- Information would be missing from the system because it was done manually
- Used Post-It Notes to keep track of work
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AFTER AUTOTASK
- Rapidly closing tickets from the field
- Freeing up time to add new clients and serve more customers
- Effortlessly capturing information to present in invoices
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COMPANY PROFILE
Gaeltek LLC, based in Manassas Park, Virginia, is a small Managed Services Provider (MSP) with a prestigious client base, including two hedge fund clients, high-visibility former government clients (the kind you see on the evening news), and the British Council in Washington, DC, Ottawa, and Montreal.
Unlike many IT Service Providers who had to transform their businesses from break-fix to managed services, three-year old Gaeltek has operated from Day One as an MSP.
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BUSINESS CHALLENGES
Gaeltek's management knew from the inception that they would need tools that would allow them to do in-depth monitoring.
After Gaeltek had been in operation for a couple of years, they realized that they needed additional tools to help them manage the business better. They wanted tools to work smarter and bring on more clients without making more work - all without compromising the company's very high standards of performance and integrity.
Integrity is a big deal for Andy Harper, Gaeltek's CIO. Previously, he was a nuclear weapons specialist in the Royal Navy and served as head of technical liaison with the US Navy on the
Trident project. As a result, Harper takes the security of Gaeltek's client data very seriously and treats everything as if it were "top secret."
Gaeltek experimented with Microsoft CRM for about six months but still had issues, so it was decided not to use Microsoft CRM for running Gaeltek.
THE AUTOTASK / LEVEL PLATFORMS SOLUTION
To meet Gaeltek's monitoring needs, the company adopted Level Platforms Managed Workplace (V3.81) early on. Due to the broad range of its capabilities, there was a steep learning curve on Level Platforms, but it gave Gaeltek personnel monitoring they never had before. They would receive alerts on handhelds, and Gaeltek clients were astounded by the company's responsiveness. Harper's view is that Level Platforms has continued to improve by leaps and bounds. "V4 was good, and V5 is even better," he says.
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"My only regret is not moving to Autotask sooner. We've been using it hard for a couple of months, and we can't live without it."
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Level Platforms allows Gaeltek to do some reports, but not all that they need, and the Gaeltek team still required business management tools. Then they met Autotask CEO Bob Godgart at SMB Nation. Harper says, "When you meet someone who is so enthusiastic about a product, it was a no-brainer to try Autotask."
He adds, "Autotask is saving us each a couple of hours a day. That's huge. All the information we need is immediately available. Instead of us having to manually enter information (which sometimes never got entered), service requests come in through the client portal. We just click - it becomes a service ticket in Autotask - and we can enter our time and notes."
"Thanks to Autotask LiveLinks, there is a seamless two way connection between Autotask and Managed Workplace," says Harper. "When Level Platforms Managed Workplace alerts us of a problem, we can log into the client's server from the field using Autotask, and it appears to the customer that the log-in is coming from our shop. Many times we solve the problem and close the ticket before the client knows there is a problem!"
CLIENT COMMENTS
"Our billing person (my wife, Amanda) is absolutely delighted. It's easy to show clients that we've been working hard for them because Autotask makes it effortless to capture the information she needs and present it in our invoices."
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Download the Gaeltek Case Study in PDF format (100 kb)
