:: BlueSaffron - Life Support Systems for Business ::

Blue Saffron Managed Services provide a platform for selected outsource of Information Communications Technology (ITC) infrastructure management. The service portfolio is comprehensive and focused on increasing the efficiency and productivity of company departments. In short the services are designed to:

Reduce costs by automating and consolidating
Broaden and improve the service levels of business technology infrastructure by increasing security, availability and reliability
Increase the capabilities of departments enabling organisations to work more effectively
Reduce the effort required to manage, operate and maintain technology

Maximum value is derived from ICT infrastructure, when forced to deliver against defined business needs and objectives. But how can you ensure that this happens when your organisation's core skills are not technology biased ? Blue Saffron delivers managed services that meet its clients' business goals and objectives, providing value that enables organisations to have:

Increased focus - to gain the maximum benefit from technology investment, it is imperative that there is a organisational focus on deployment and management. By engaging Blue Saffron as your managed service provider, you are ensuring that this focus on technology is a permanent priority within your business; that it is never compromised by other business priorities, and that through innovative thinking, technology continues to work for the business effectively meeting both current and future business needs.
Improved process - properly managed IT and telecommunications should be a business asset rather than a liability. To derive maximum benefit from that asset, technology should be run in a controlled fashion, underpinned by solid processes and procedures. As a managed service provider, BSG necessarily runs IT in this way offering immediate benefit to its customers.
Wider skill base - in an increasingly complex and geographical dispersed commerce environment businesses are required to familiarize themselves with an ever broadening range of technologies. It is through a managed service provider that truly cost effective service management can be realized. Customers gain instant, but flexible, access to a 24x7pool of professional IT and telephony talent.

Many small businesses do not have a dedicated IT department and are willing to turn over the installation, maintenance, and upgrading of their networks to a qualified service provider. If you have IT personnel, choosing to contract outside of your organization for managed services allows you to reduce or reallocate these resources, relieving highly skilled, expensive staff of routine tasks such as monitoring routers, responding to help-desk inquiries, and resolving user problems. The result is increased IT staff productivity. The staff can turn its attention to strategic projects, improving service quality, enabling employee mobility, and integrating new technology-all proven productivity-enhancing services. Likewise, business owners can focus on cost control and new market opportunities for revenue growth.

Blue Saffron's experience has identified five primary areas where the adoption of managed services by SME community,, can generate cost savings- through the reduction of traditional service fees, hardware, IT operational costs, and transport. In a recent case study a medium-sized business reduces service fees by 31 percent, IT costs by 48 percent, hardware costs by 17 percent, and transport costs by 4 percent (Figure 2) after adopting the managed services listed in the table below.

Managed Service Type	Description
Managed IP telephony	Managed IP telephony service provides, provisions, and manages telephony elements and the network.

Managed IP VPN service	Managed IP VPN service enables IP telephony networks, differentiating, and securing voice traffic from lower-priority data traffic through QoS and class of service (CoS) mechanisms.

Managed router service with dedicated Internet access	Managed router service with dedicated Internet access improves QoS by improving router integration with the service provider network that controls router settings.

Managed LAN service	Managed LAN service extends QoS into the LAN and helps to ensure application quality from the desktop to the router.

Managed firewall service	Managed firewall service secures remote locations and protects the integrity of the voice and data network.

Managed E-Mail service	Host E-Mail on Microsoft Exchange, MDaemon and further access mobile on the move through Nokia, Microsoft or Blackberry applications

Breakdown of Recurring Cost Reductions

Depending on the characteristics of the business, much of the cost reduction in service fees can come from removing an outmoded traditional PBX environment in favor of IP telephony. Traditional PBX customers pay providers standard management fees and maintenance contract fees plus hardware costs. When employee phones and other devices are moved, added, and changed, significant additional costs are incurred. While IP telephony fees replace traditional PBX costs, the IP telephony fees cover telephony hardware, maintenance, and other costs that were additional expenses in the PBX environment. These moves, adds, and changes occur at a fraction of the cost with an IP telephony network.

As a business, you save because you do not have to purchase or upgrade hardware. The greatest savings come from replacing the PBX, but with a managed service you can offload the ownership of switches, routers, and firewalls, as well as the software and platforms required to monitor the network.

The remaining savings potential comes from reduced or reallocated IT resources and the lower costs associated with digital transport networks. Because the responsibility for managing their networks has been out-tasked, IT staff spends less time monitoring the network, upgrading facilities and platforms, and restoring service to a troubled network. In addition, the cost for setting up and deploying these network platforms and policies is transferred to the service provider. At the same time, IT groups have better, more flexible opportunities to redesign their networks, relying on service provider network intelligence to provide greater efficiency to satisfy bandwidth demand. This reduced need for IT resources in network management can yield a combination of benefits. Your business is left with lower IT costs and greater profitability. And you can reallocate IT resources to strategic projects that address core business requirements, resulting in greater productivity for the IT department and employees across the organization.

It is important to remember that this breakdown of savings, though typical, may not reflect every business's actual savings. Generally speaking, businesses operating in a distributed environment with multiple remote sites, or branch offices with fewer employees, will realize greater savings from managed services than from in-house management.

Service Name	Related Products	Description
Email	Managed Exchange Managed Mdaemon Managed Blackberry Enterprise Server Managed Nokia Business Server Anti-virus Anti-spam Adult Content Filtering	Hosted and simple industrial strength email

IP Multimedia	IP Multimedia Voice	A managed services platformthat carries voice communications (IP telephony or VOIP), multimedia messaging and a range of colaborative applications

Broadband	Managed Broadband MPLS Network VPN Network	A market leading portfolio of broadband products from 512Kb to high end managed wide area products

IT Resource Management	Managed Desktop Managed LAN	A full service lifecycle from procurement to disposal

Support	Support	Flexible outsourcing of third party maintenance contracts

VPN	VPN Network	Secure,robust intersite communications

Hosting	Managed Hosting	Enterprise shared and dedicated hosting

Managed Firewall	Managed Firewall	World class managed security service

BlueSaffron Managed Services ™

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