The Client. Epic Technologies is a telecom solutions provider that focuses heavily on the health care industry. The company employs 11 people in middle Tennessee and serves clients in the Knoxville, Chattanooga and Nashville areas, as well as regional and national accounts.

The Challenge. Epic needed to transition to a managed services model so it could offer IT services in addition to telephony. However, the companys foray into IT wasnt going as smoothly as Don Viar, Epics managing partner, had hoped. He invested hundreds of man hours running and monitoring software in-house, while managing what he called a hodgepodge of vendors” to support network operations and help-desk services.

As a result, Epics growth was slow and disjointed, at best. Epic needed a partner that could help it provide a complete solution, so it could have greater control over its customers overall networks, not just their telecom infrastructure.

The Solution. Epic partnered with Continuum, a Boston-based managed services provider. Continuum maintains a full-service, 24-hour Network Operations Center (NOC) and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) Service Desk. Because of those resources, Epic was able to become an outsourced IT department for its clients, without having to hire more people or pay for excessive man hours.

Continuum executes our IT offering, yet looks and feels like a natural extension of our services,” said Viar. Theres never a differentiation between what Epic is doing and what Continuum is doing in the eyes of the customer.”

The Results. Epic has extended its technicians across an increased client base, supporting an average of 250 users per technician. As a result, Epic was able to nearly double its managed services revenue in one year.

Our goal for 2012 was to grow managed services revenue by 25 percent without adding staff. In reality, we grew by 92 percent without adding staff,” Viar said.

The increases came thanks in large part to help-desk capabilities and SLA improvements.

First, the Continuum Service Desk helped reduce Epics internal workload, so staff are able to respond to customer issues as they develop. Epics service board went from maintaining as many as 120-130 open tickets at a time, to an average of 40-45 tickets. And since the Continuum NOC operates around the clock, not only can it address late-night network issues that otherwise might have resulted in downtime, but most problems are resolved before Epics clients report to work.

Epic now performs like a larger organization than it could alone, so it can pursue growth opportunities in the complex healthcare marketplace. As one example, Epic has secured an extended contract with a regional health care practice that is expanding into a national chain of clinics.

And finally, Epic’s volume of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) also has increased.  Because Continuum handles a majority of lower-level issues, Epics senior technicians are freed up to deliver more support and customer service. The volume of our SLAs have gone from 82 percent to 96 percent since we started working with Continuum,” Viar said.