“More small businesses are using man aged services,” says Sandra Palumbo, a research fellow at the Yankee Group.“It continues to grow as they move into cloud services, in part because of companies needing to decrease infrastructure costs.” Ahmed started NetServe in 1996 with the intent to service businesses with 250 employees or less that needed economical and reliable IT solutions. He has been able to do that by using virtual network computing (VNC), a remote management tool that allows an IT professional to gain access of one computer from another computer to fix a problem. Although
VNC has been around for more than a decade, companies like NetServe can monitor the server network, software applications, e-mail servers, Web design, hosting, and telecom devices for small and medium businesses at a reduced cost. With 22 employees (six engineers dedicated to supporting managed solutions), NetServe Systems generated $3.8 million in 2009.Although NetServe technicians have access to data on their client’s servers, Ahmed says that confidentiality is not a problem. Technicians get a background check, and NetServe’s own proprietary monitoring software sends the client a comprehensive audit trail every time their network is breached. Remote access eliminatesthe need for a dedicated IT staff and helps small and medium-sized businesses with three to 10 employees spend less than $500 a month (or $5,000 a year) on their IT budget. Those with 20 to 150 employees will spend about $20,000 to $30,000 a year; a deal compared to coughing up an annual salary of $55,000 to $80,000 for a full-time IT professional, says Ahmed.“If you have a [computer] and you are connected to the Internet we can man-age you. It doesn’t matter where you are,” says Ahmed who serves clients as far away as Atlanta. “If a backup server goes down in the middle of the night, our guy logs in and restarts the server. At 8 a.m. when they log into the office it’s as if nothing has happened.”