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Teaming Up with the Right Management Service: Page 9 of 25

Intelligent Network Operations Services, HCL Technologies America, (908) 822-9036. www.hcltech.com


Simply put, NetProactive's response was the most expensive by a long margin at a little over $200,000 monthly (compared with the next highest, PerformanceIT's $128,000) and with a much lower personnel offset cost of only $47,000. Additionally, NetProactive didn't address as many of TacDoh's needs as the other MSPs. In its favor, reporting looked to be above average, providing good access and a decent selection of performance metrics.

NetProactive's response was brief and to the point. Unfortunately, this brevity was not limited to the RFI: The stated services provided were also brief. For example, NetProactive was unwilling to stand in for TacDoh with other service providers, putting TacDoh right back in the business of negotiating and managing WAN services.

NetProactive, which is based in Bangalore, India, will audit and configure as needed QoS on the network infrastructure to improve the chances that transactions will be serviced in a timely fashion. Alerts will also be set to allow for the notification of any network transit time that exceeds 2 seconds.

No monitoring of the PoS system was included in the price. No billing credit, just reporting on total device availability. Intervening with network devices and the availability of the store network systems are supported, but NetProactive voiced concern that since the back-end database systems were out of its control, it couldn't guarantee PoS availability and throughput.

Although NetProactive will provide reports to help manage our WAN providers, we were disappointed when it specifically indicated that TacDoh is on its own if WAN problems arise.