TSANet Europe Annual General Meeting/Member Meeting
The meeting is hosted by TSANet global member CA in the glorious historical setting at their training and education centre Ditton Manor, Datchet UK.
The AGM will be a blend of industry guest speakers TSANet members and presentations on the hot topics of the day in the support industry.
The main theme will, as always, be centered on what is important to the delegates in their day to day business.
IT Services & Support – “No longer the afterthought …”
click here to see full agenda
The IT industry was born out of the ever increasing thirst for high technology – applications,
databases, middleware, networking, silicon chips, Silicon Valley, storage systems, software –
the sheer size of the IT thesaurus is testament to this. So it is not surprising that it has been
a product-led industry. Vendors compete to develop and deliver the latest ‘cool’ technology and offerings.
Of course they needed to offer service and support. But typically support evolved as an afterthought
born out of engineering – the primary business goal was to market and sell the product at margins that a
relatively new and immature market would bear.
However, the market is rapidly maturing. As ‘box movers’ become commodity suppliers they must find ways of adding
value and margin. Functions that were once the province of specialized hardware can now be performed in software.
Software applications and databases that were once bought as a product can now be leased, rented or subscribed to as a utility.
An entire IT infrastructure can be outsourced - and not just the large scale public / enterprise sector but increasingly at the SME level too.
Vendors merge and acquire competitors and partners at a very fast pace to survive by traditional means …
Across all this product-led turmoil and uncertainty the ability to offer the customer consistent high quality service
and support takes on a new dimension. If some may accuse IT support of not being glamorous, it can ultimately prove to
be the overlooked ‘Cinderella’ that enables the IT industry to truly grow. The ability to forge a good long lasting
customer relationship around good service can outlast the relatively short- lived ‘wow factor’ of any good product.
What this really boils down to is that support is a People and Process business, independent of product.
If you get the business model right, service moves from a cost-of-sale engineering afterthought to the real bottom-line
that allows stable long-term growth. Better support also means being able to work easily with other support organizations – the core focus of TSANet.
The TSANet AGM, May 10-11 2006 promises to be the ideal opportunity to understand better and debate this trend
towards service and support as being the long-term winner in the IT marketplace.
In 2 days attendees will understand
services as a business from all the key perspectives.
