6 Tips Toward Painless Service Provider Relationships

Thinking of outsourcing your WAN? These tips will help you build and maintain a successful long-term partnership with the right network service provider.

Lenny Liebmann

November 23, 2015

7 Slides
6 Tips Toward Painless Service Provider Relationships

Businesses of all kinds are outsourcing their WANs to managed network service providers. Several factors are driving growth in this area, including: 

  • The expectation that a service provider's economies of scale will reduce operational costs

  • The expectation that a service provider will be able to more adaptively make changes to the WAN in response to changing business needs

  • The need to access skills and experience not easily acquired and retained in-house

  • Broader IT outsourcing strategies intended to keep in-house staff more focused on core business imperatives than on general technology operations

  • A quest for better network performance that will contribute to improvements in both the digital customer experience and internal end-user productivity.

While these may theoretically be perfectly good reasons to engage a managed network service provider, the reality is a bit less simple. All service providers are not alike -- so network decision makers have to carefully evaluate any potential partner. And a successful service provider engagement doesn't just depend on a careful evaluation upfront. Even a relationship with a great partner can go south if you don't manage it correctly. 

Here, then, are six practical tips -- based on the hard-learned lessons of companies that didn't apply them -- for making sure that you build and maintain a successful long-term relationship with the right network service provider.

(Cover image: anadaBGD/iStockphoto)

About the Author

Lenny Liebmann

Founding Partner, Morgan Armstrong

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