IT Service Providers and Outsourced Operations
Serving many customers is not the same job as running one company's endpoints: tenant separation, whose brand shows, and how to size channels.
Updated
Service providers and internal IT get lumped together. They are two different buyers.
Internal IT manages its own company’s assets, and the boundary is obvious. A service provider manages other people’s assets — several other people’s — and that creates three problems internal IT never meets.
One: customers have to be separated
Engineer A covers customer Alpha; engineer B covers customer Beta. A should not see Beta’s machines in the device list. Customers ask about this, and it is the line of responsibility when something goes wrong.
Grouping plus group sharing is where this lands: a group per customer, shared with the engineers who cover it — rather than one flat list held together by a naming convention. Group sharing starts at the Team edition.
Two: whose name the customer sees
Whether the client shows your brand or the vendor’s is not cosmetic in this business. You invoice for the service; if the customer sees someone else’s logo every time, your presence erodes over time.
Custom branding starts at the Team edition. The wider set of branding trade-offs is in customer-facing remote support.
Three: size channels by engineers, not devices
This is the number service providers most often get wrong.
You might have dozens of customers and thousands of devices under management, but what runs concurrently is your engineers on shift. WorksLink bills per concurrent channel, so:
Channels ≈ engineers who might be working at the same time — not customers, and certainly not devices.
Start from engineers on shift, watch the peak for a month or two, adjust. Adding channels later beats over-buying up front: the surplus sits on the invoice, not in the business.
Who holds the licence
Both arrangements are common, and it is worth settling at quoting time:
- You hold it — the licence is yours, and the customer’s devices have to be re-enrolled if they change provider
- The customer holds it — the licence is theirs and you connect as the operator, so a provider change hands over cleanly
That is a contract question rather than a technical one, but it determines who loses what when the engagement ends. Better settled early.
The actual support practice
The above is the shape of the business. How the support itself runs — connection model, where the audit trail goes, when integration starts paying off — is in customer-facing remote support.