It's amazing to me that Jenaly is moving toward entering it's 13th year in business in 2010. During this time, we've witnessed several evolving trends in IT service delivery models. When I started Jenaly, back in 1997, I was intent not to sell any products. This was based on my disappointment in hiring other IT services firms and realizing each was basically just a dealer for the product (hardware or software) that they were representing. They really did not understand what I was looking for as a business IT consumer. That frustrated me and the vision for Jenaly was born from this frustration.
I wanted to be able to look my clients straight in the eye and know that the recommendations we were making were solely based on their business need and not influenced by the behind the scenes dealer relationship that had frustrated me in the past. In other words, I did not want Jenaly to be bound by sales quotas, commissions and back end rebates that would influence our recommendations to our clients. This has been difficult to manage at times, as some of the hardware and software vendors only want to work with organizations that will commit to a sales volume with them. I understand this and while it works in some situations, I still believe it's not the right model for a true IT services like company like Jenaly. Fortunately for us, and our clients, the manufacturers and vendors have been increasingly concerned about this too and have created programs to work with companies like Jenaly. To me, this has been validation of our service delivery model.
Over the years, our clients asked us to order what they needed and deliver it to them, so we are definitely in the business of selling hardware and software to our clients. However, the key still is that we only sell what is right for our clients. We have learned to leverage manufacturer programs and industry groups to obtain discounted pricing for our clients, so we not only insure they are getting what they truly need, but we are also able to do so at better than average prices.
The trend over the last several years has been Managed Services, which in it's simplest form may be considered proactive IT services. This is a model that we adopted back in early 2000 and have been expanding ever since. It placed the responsibilty on us, as the IT services partner, to insure our clients networks are maintained properly and operating at peak efficiency. I continue to look to increase the value proposition of our services. I am very keen on moving toward better flat rate pricing where we will manage our clients entire IT infrastructure for a fixed price, based on the needs of the environment. This will give the client a predictable monthly budget for IT and insure that we operate as efficiently as possible. This will avoid unwelcome surprises for our clients and insure we both have "skin in the game" as they say. We've been doing fixed priced projects like this for some time and the model works well, so it only makes sense.
I love the fact that this business continues to evolve and never seems to get stale. The key is that the changes bring benefits for our clients and for us, as for any business to be successful, there must be a win-win relationship between us and our clients. I think we've been able to achieve this and we continue to innovate in ways that deliver more value to our clients while still allowing our business to grow. It's why I love what I do.
