IT Assessments: Nothing for Free

A new road

Although acuity still does some assessing for free, the days of giveaways are numbered, according to industry observers. As IDC analyst Christina Richmond pointed out, with shrinking margins on hardware, add-on services such as assessments become more important to a solution provider’s business.

“Instead of earning a commission on selling a customer 10 boxes in a month, the goal of assessments is for the reseller to get to own the customer for a longer period of time,” Richmond said.

Steve Feldman, president of Graphtech Systems, a 19-year-old solution provider in Deerfield, Ill., views assessments as the next frontier in services, and they have grown in importance in his business.

“As we’ve seen the shift from margins in products to margins in services, we’ve definitely become more assessment-focused,” Feldman said.

Today, Graphtech, a $5 billion company focused on SMB customers, charges an average of $7,500 to $9,500 per assessment. “We do a deeper-level assessment to understand the customer’s entire environment and IT and business processes,” Feldman said. “We’re not paid to fix problems; we’re paid to prevent problems from occurring and to make improvements in the IT environment.”

While Graphtech has always had a methodology for conducting assessments, it was only over the past couple of years that the company developed its RAPIDS (research, analysis, planning, implementation, deployment and support) framework, according to Feldman. The research and analysis components of RAPID represent the assessment piece of the framework.

Graphtech, a member of Ingram Micro’s VentureTech Network, a group of independent solution providers that share ideas, resources and technology, uses TAP (Technology Assessment Profile) 6.0, a comprehensive assessment tool offered to VARs that participate in Ingram Micro’s solution provider network, as one of several data collection tools.

“We also use a number of agent-based network tools to get a snapshot of the current health of the network environment, and we do a video assessment,” said Feldman. The complete assessment uses information gathered from the technology and video assessments and business process interviews.

Kirk Robinson, vice present of channel marketing for North America at Ingram Micro, said networking, security, wireless and storage are the most popular areas for assessments.

“Five years ago, resellers weren’t ready to charge their customers because they weren’t as confident in solution selling,” said Robinson in Santa Ana, Calif. But since then, as VARs become trusted IT advisers to customers, more are charging for assessments. “For some resellers, it is becoming another revenue stream,” Robinson said.

Developed by Ingram Micro several years ago, TAP is an online data collection tool used by solution providers while conducting an assessment.

“In 2002, we saw the tool and loved it,” said Alan McDonald, president of AllConnected, a $2.5 million solution provider in Simi Valley, Calif., that specializes in security for the SMB and education markets. “TAP provides a broad agnostic assessment that helps us discover areas of potential opportunities,” McDonald said, adding that he also uses tools from Cisco Systems to get more detailed information for security assessments.

TAP covers 16 business and technology categories, asking questions in each category. From the answers to more than 300 questions, McDonald compiles a 20-page-plus report that is discussed in a discovery process follow-up meeting with the customer. Decisions are then made as to what upgrades and new technology the customer needs.

Rather than merely cranking out a job proposal, assessments pave the way to creating a technology road map that covers recommendations on how to improve technology and business processes for the long term.

“We don’t want the customer’s check now; we want to be partners with the customer for the next five to 10 years or more,” said McDonald.

See-Comm’s Starr said a true assessment is a thorough presentation document that shows the full deliverables rather than simply a list of products. “We diagram for the customer where they are now, where they want to be, the gap in between and what it will take to get them from where they are to where they want to be,” Starr said.

Graphtech’s Feldman said three-quarters of all his company’s assessments lead to product implementations and long-term relationships where, in essence, Graphtech becomes a partner to customers.

Increasingly, customers taking advantage of IT assessments are SMBs. While larger enterprises took the lead in conducting assessments years ago—-having either the IT resources to conduct in-house assessments or the financial resources to hire someone else to do it—more SMBs are growing to understand the importance of doing assessments on the front end.