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Case Study: LEAP Consulting
Business Development
 The Challenge: Getting multiple components to provide unified service excellence.
Being a managed IT service provider is a complicated business, best served by a simple solution — even if you have to find it on the other side of the world.
With a focus on providing managed IT solutions to CPAs, other financial services and legal firms, Leap Consulting in Perth, Australia relies on a complex mix of solutions to serve their clients. Their product portfolio is comprised of solutions from vendors such as Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, Lenovo, Trend Micro, HP, Symantec, Storage Craft, Dell, SonicWALL, Quantum and 3Com.
“Each solution was chosen because of its compatibility in an accounting infrastructure environment and the resulting vendor support,” explains Leap Consulting Operations Director Zaun Bhana. “We have found our solution set works equally well in legal practices, financial planning firms and other associated service-based businesses.”
At the same time Zaun notes that accountants may use up to 20 different applications during the course of a single day. The challenge then was getting everything to work together. Zaun points out, “The last thing (our customers) want is an IT partner who doesn't understand or won't work with their applications.”
As of 2007, Leap was using Microsoft CRM for the company’s client and ticket management. But “the significant amount of time it took for us to get it to work the way we needed prompted us to seek alternatives,” Zaun says.
“We looked at a number of local offerings in the Australian marketplace, but most were just pure ticketing systems and offered none of the other features we wanted — such as integration with our Kaseya operating platform,” Zaun says. The company then began an extensive research that included checking forums, newsgroups and reading industry publications. ConnectWise was a clear favorite.
“The more we investigated the ConnectWise offering, the more we were impressed with how much it matched our requirements.” In August of last year, Leap Consulting went live with ConnectWise.
The Solution
The first order of business was integrating ConnectWise into Leap’s Kaseya system. Zaun was very pleased with the result. “The ease of access and operation of the Kaseya platform through ConnectWise has made supporting and managing client sites much easier for our engineers,” he says.
As the integration proceeded, more positive results followed — with seamless implementation of automation and standardization standing out as the greatest benefits delivered by ConnectWise. “It has dramatically increased the effectiveness of our service delivery, which in turn increased customer satisfaction and loyalty,” he notes.
“With so many different applications, hardware dependencies, constant updates from software vendors, varied deployments and a standard expectation of rapid resolution, ConnectWise has become our glue,” Zaun says. “All the different facets of the ConnectWise platform enable us to turn what is an extremely complex and niche level of expertise into a very responsive, reliable and streamlined offering to our clients.”
The Results
According to Zaun, Leap would have been at a tremendous disadvantage as a managed services provider without the automation provided by ConnectWise. But with the PSA solution, there is no guesswork regarding such considerations as engineer utilization, support usage by client, ticket resolution timeframes or profitability of service. Zaun says, “Our plans are now based on solid and identifiable benchmarks which alone are worth the price we paid for the ConnectWise platform.”
Additionally Zaun comments, “ConnectWise has really put us on a different trajectory. It has been a paradigm shift from having so many disparate, rudimentary systems to having a single tool we can utilize to run all aspects of our business.”
“More than anything, ConnectWise has allowed us to take advantage of the true potential in our business model and put in place the structure we needed in order to move forward,” he concludes.
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