Stretching your network budget: Delegate

With all that network executives are being asked to provide these days it's no wonder people are turning to outsourcers. And outsourcing doesn't mean handing over your entire network to an outsider - it means you can select a particular task and hire someone to handle it for you.

Barron Wright, network services manager at Saxon Mortgage, says outsourcing is helping him stretch his budget. When the company began expanding rapidly Wright realized his department didn't have the necessary skills to manage a WAN.

So Wright put his WAN in the hands of NetSolve, an Austin, Texas, company that specializes in remote network management. NetSolve came up with recommendations on how much bandwidth Wright would need as he connected each new sales office. NetSolve installs and configures the frame relay access devices at the offices and provides round-the-clock, real-time network management.

"If there's an outage in Denver, they notify us,'' Wright says. NetSolve describes the problem and gives Wright an estimate for when the appropriate carrier is expected to have the problem fixed.

With 14 offices scattered across the country, Wright says he would be at a loss to track the source of a problem on his own. But NetSolve "seems to have quick channels into the carriers,'' he says.

For example, one of the links Wright set up before NetSolve came on board - an MCI WorldCom frame relay link from his Richmond, Va., headquarters to a branch office in Ft. Worth, Texas - would mysteriously go down several times a day. Wright was unable to get to the root of the problem. But NetSolve was able to press the carrier to focus on the problem that, it turned out, had to do with the local loop. Once the regional Bell operating company installed some new copper, the problem disappeared.

Wright says he also likes NetSolve's Web-based reporting system, which allows him to log on to the NetSolve site, track his trouble tickets and view performance reports on his network.

Wright says he pays NetSolve $30,000 per year for the service, and he estimates that it would have cost him close to $120,000 if he had to hire a full-time person to manage the frame relay network.

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Negotiate
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