Overview
Award-winning IT service provider Lewan Technology boasts nearly half a century of experience bringing office technology solutions and IT support to customers in Denver and the Rocky Mountain region. Beginning with typewriters and calculators, the solution provider has navigated sweeping shifts in the IT landscape, and today focuses on selling Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and associated services.
Lewan Technology uses LogicMonitor to generate revenue by packaging monitoring services into all of its offerings. Monitoring-as-a-Service has become an integral part of its total approach to managed services, and beyond that, the comprehensive visibility offered by LogicMonitor allows Lewan to help its customers increase troubleshooting efficiency and manage complex networks. This is particularly true in the Oil & Gas Industry.
The Challenges Facing Service Providers
The transition from on-premisess IT infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure has changed the way service providers deliver value to their customers. The goal in a datacenter environment is to ensure IT resources stay up and running. Today’s service provider solves this challenge even when they are not directly managing many elements of the infrastructure—particularly with cloud resources.
Service provider’s have to be efficient at troubleshooting—a task made more difficult by the diminishing direct control they have over IT infrastructure brought by the transition to the public cloud. In today’s environment, service providers are finding it imperative to have tools to collaborate with cloud providers and other partners, on whom their ability to deliver IT resources to their customers depends.
Beating the Challenges of the Cloud with Improved Visibility
Lewan is using LogicMonitor to make the evolving role of service providers easier. With LogicMonitor dashboards that can be shared freely with partners, including cloud providers and telecoms, Lewan can diagnose infrastructure problems efficiently.
“LogicMonitor makes us confident that we’re providing top-notch IT support. It’s flexible enough to allow us to customize it, and it’s very easy to integrate widely.”
– Wray Smith, VP of Technology Services
“If it’s latency with the datacenter that’s causing poor performance, it’s now IT’s responsibility to fix it, whether or not it was our fault originally,” says Wray Smith, VP of Technology Services at Lewan. “We use LogicMonitor as a way of sharing information in order to collaborate and find the fastest possible resolution on behalf of the customer.” Continues Wray, “LogicMonitor allows us to rapidly create custom dashboards, and share them via web tools and mobile devices with parties who otherwise could never see that the problem is with their systems.”
With this level of visibility and the ability to share views into the whole IT infrastructure with relevant partners, Lewan is maximizing the efficiency of troubleshooting in the challenging cloud environment, and has recovered a proactive role.
Visibility Translated to Increased Margins
With LogicMonitor, Lewan is able to give its customers the same level of direct visibility into the performance of their own infrastructures. This has direct implications for increased margins and operational efficiency. Customers with co-managed services are empowered to fix issues on their own without submitting a service ticket.
As a result, Lewan has drastically reduced time spent on routine problems, reserving service manpower for more critical and complex issues. Customers also get visibility into how their service requests are being handled and can see issue resolution in real time, assuring them their requests are being handled promptly and thoroughly.
Wray Smith notes that LogicMonitor has allowed Lewan to give its customers a valuable executive-level view into the IT infrastructure. “Executives don’t want to see a lot of graphs tracking IT performance over time—they want business-relevant information,” says Wray. “LogicMonitor gives us the ability to deliver customized dashboards that provide executive-level verification that everything is safe, secure, and operating correctly. Our customers can show their own executives information like number of transactions completed today, bandwidth, or the number of phone calls made by sales.
This is valuable if you’re trying to assess employee productivity and essential if you want IT to be seen as an enabler rather than a cost center.” According to Wray, “LogicMonitor makes us confident that we’re providing top-notch IT support. It’s flexible enough to allow us to customize it, and it’s very easy to integrate widely.”
Delivering Monitoring-as-a-Service to Generate New Revenue
The ability to provide visibility into complex client infrastructures has proven so valuable that Lewan has architected a service offering around it, tailored to specific tasks and audiences.
Lewan established the Monitoring-as-a-Service model to monetize monitoring and round out its portfolio. “For us, Monitoring-as-a-Service means we take care of the installation of LogicMonitor and tune it to your use cases, but the alerting goes to you, the customer,” says Wray Smith. “LogicMonitor was the product that enabled us to do that, because of its service provider-friendly pricing model. Unlike other products, there are no premises based licenses and no infrastructure to deal with. We started Monitoring-as-a-Service with LogicMonitor and the platform has given us a fruitful way to capture revenue from monitoring.
“We started Monitoring-as-a-Service with LogicMonitor. It’s given us a fruitful way to capture revenue from monitoring.”
– Wray Smith, VP of Technology Services
Monitoring-as-a-service has enabled Lewan to generate new revenue by appealing to a broader set of customers. This is done through offering flexible IT services that can target specific segments of a customer’s IT infrastructure with different levels of service. Depending on customer needs, some segments of IT are best managed through 24×7 “always-on” service, ensuring alerting for business critical functions, while for other services, Lewan adds value simply by exposing performance metrics regarding a customer’s infrastructure with a shared LogicMonitor dashboard.
Vertical Specialization: Managing Complex Oil & Gas Networks
Visibility and the ability to share dashboard data with a wide range of partners allows Lewan to manage complex networks better than ever before. This, combined with their geographic location and LogicMonitor’s ability to monitor specialized field equipment has allowed Lewan to carve out an important niche in the oil and gas sector.
“We operate in Colorado, and that means we’re at the center of the Great Plains oil and gas operations,” says Wray. “The oil and gas industry in places like Wyoming use mobile field radios to monitor drilling, pumps, and other equipment in remote locations that aren’t served by telecom providers. This leaves them without the possibility of reliable methods of communication.”
The equipment used in these applications relies on the SNMP protocol, which offers IP connectivity and is eventually interfaced with LAN or SCADA architectures. LogicMonitor gives Lewan visibility into this entire network, from a radio on a pump in rural Wyoming through complex network connections right up to the cloud services that store and process data. Lewan then packages that data, delivering actionable information throughout the organization, from executives to maintenance personnel on the ground.
Says Wray, “We’re not experts in radio maintenance or SNMP, and the maintenance personnel driving around in pickup trucks in Wyoming aren’t experts at monitoring. But with LogicMonitor we have the tools to bridge that gap and provide the maintenance guys the information they need to do their jobs and keep the network running.”
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