Citadel Group: managed services offer one throat to choke

With Citadel Group deputy chief executive Darren Stanley.

What infrastructure or cloud vendors underpin your managed services offering?

We have a diverse service offering and client base so we use a multitude of technology stacks and partners, notably HPE, Microsoft Azure, OrionVM, ServiceNow and Cisco. We also see advantages working with companies like Sliced Tech and Interactive.

What remote monitoring and management vendors do you work with?

SALUS: an in-house-developed monitoring suite. We use Monitis, Crestron and AMX. We may also use Nagios in the future.

What ITSM vendors do you work with?

ServiceNow is all we use for IT service management.

When did your company first get involved in this area?

We are a managed services business that started out working closely with a range of defence organisations. Our first managed services contract started back in 1996 with health. In early 2006 we had our first big managed services material contract with defence. We've held both since.

What distributors do you use to support your managed services offering?

HPE, Rhipe, Dell and Cisco.

Can you tell us about any recent work you’ve done?

We recently re-won the Defence DRMS contract again. We have worked successfully with them for many years. We've also won with a large G8 university to deliver, design, install and support as-a-service for their AV, VC and UC solutions. That was earlier this year.

What is driving customers towards managed services?

A single point of accountability, for one thing. When managing critically important information, you don’t want finger pointing between various parties. Guaranteed service levels and outcomes would be another one. Reducing the need to train their own staff, preferring someone like us to be on top of that. Predictability of spend.

Managed services is…?

Managed services are anything that delivers value to a client through a structured service in a way that guarantees the outcome through agreed service levels.