“It’s been a while since we only provided landlines or SIM cards for mobile phones,” says Joeri Schnetz, Operational Director of VTM. VTM is one of the largest IT companies in the Netherlands. It is a Microsoft Solution Partner and a KPN Business Partner, and is mainly active in the B2B market. It also works for government agencies and local authorities.
“We have gone from being a telecommunications company to being a fully fledged MSP [Managed Service Provider – ed.]. This means that we offer our clients a wide range of solutions combining telecommunications and IT, such as telecommunications, IT, networking, IoT, business applications and security. But adoption, too, such as teaching training courses, is an important component of our work. If you only supply the technology, people won’t necessarily know how to use it. We don’t just want to give our clients a hammer. We want to show them how to use it, so that they can build that birdhouse themselves.”
Trends in IT
Schnetz, who has been with VTM for 18 years, seldom gets bored of his job. “Things keep changing in the market. A few years ago, large numbers of small and medium-sized enterprises made the switch to cloud-based services. Many companies have now largely completed that transition. This means that we IT companies now face a new challenge: a complex landscape full of applications and integrated services. Are we in control of these services? Do we know where they are hosted, and do we understand what’s going on? And what about the security risks?
IT used to be less complex in many respects. In the old days, we built firewalls and constructed big walls around companies’ networks and data. Those things have become impossible in this era of cloud-based services and highly professional cybercriminals. In addition, things are more and more interconnected these days. The old model, in which one single person was responsible for all IT-related matters in small companies, has become obsolete. We need to provide accessible information, standardisation and awareness. It’s the only way to provide the kind of quality that is needed to protect modern companies’ online security and keep them up and running.”
Standardisation = quality
Schnetz feels that standardisation is vital precisely because IT is undergoing rapid transformation. “Everything that can be standardised will help Managed Service Providers deliver higher-quality services.” As an example, he mentions Supervision, a tool that allows MSPs to roll out a complete Microsoft set-up at multiple clients in accordance with their own ‘Golden Master’ principles.
“Obviously, MSPs want to offer all their clients the very highest-quality services. However, it takes time to install Microsoft set-ups and several of my colleagues work for different clients. In such situations, how can we guarantee that all set-ups are the same?
Tools like Supervision allow us to aim for the efficiency and quality standards we want to offer our clients. Back in the old days, when new clients were onboarded, we first had to manually upload several scripts. Afterwards, we had to manually adjust particular settings. Now it’s a matter of hooking the deliverable up to Supervision and rolling out our master set-up in one go.”
Automation reduces the need for repetitive work, which helps you save time
In daily practice, this not only helps MSPs save a lot of time, but also helps them improve the quality of their services. “There is less scope for human error,” says Schnetz. “What’s more, IT officers generally don’t enjoy work that only involves ticking boxes. By automating these types of tasks, we gain more time to monitor and optimise our systems.
After all, we can now see at a glance whether our clients’ settings are OK and whether or not they are in compliance with the latest upgrades. The more repetitive tasks we can automate, the better. I’m absolutely convinced of that. The real, fun challenge is determining how to improve things even further, or how to respond to new policies. What Supervision gives us is enough time to try and answer those questions.”
AI will pose a major challenge
Schnetz believes that we will badly need that extra time to answer those questions in the coming years, because the rise of new AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot will present us with new IT challenges.
“Things are changing very rapidly,” Schnetz says once again. “New tools like Copilot obviously present end users with great opportunities, but we IT officers must determine what they mean in terms of data access and rights management. To give you a basic example: let’s say a user asks Copilot to draw up a sales report for a particular line of products. How can we ensure that Copilot does so on the basis of the most recent documents, rather than on the basis of some Word file from 2018? Do we exclude old files? And do all employees actually need access to all the files that are stored on the server? With the rise of AI, such questions about data sets and data access will become even more relevant than before.”
Schnetz says that Supervision may even be able to play a vital role in issues like those: “After all, we will remain responsible for our clients’ system management after the onboarding procedure. Which is necessary, because things change all the time, within Microsoft or other integrated services, but also in terms of cybersecurity risks. For our clients’ sake, we want to be able to respond quickly to new threats and comply with the latest standards.
Supervision quickly tells us where we are in that respect. We can see each client’s real-time set-up, and can adjust and improve it quickly. Or we can implement a new baseline, which we can then roll out quickly and easily. If our clients manually change things themselves, we will be alerted. This will then allow us to perform a check and determine whether the change meets our quality standards. We also perform morning checks to proactively determine whether any improvements are required.”
Development partner and collaboration with other MSPs
VTM was involved in the development of Supervision in its capacity as a development partner. Supervision was developed by another MSP, BSU (headquartered in Veghel, province of Noord-Brabant), and became part of a joint venture with KPN last year. But, according to Schnetz, the two IT companies do not regard each other as rivals, more as partners.
“That’s the unique thing about KPN’s Partner Network. It genuinely managed to establish a close-knit community of Business Partners. An ecosystem in which IT companies collaborate to improve their products and services. Which is also the unique thing about Supervision. It wasn’t developed by KPN itself, but rather by an MSP, and further improved in association with other MSPs.”
As a development partner, VTM was one of the first users of Supervision, more than eighteen months ago. “This gave us the opportunity to show where our priorities lay and which features really mattered to us. We collaborated in order to further improve the product.”
The benefits of collaboration
For Schnetz, that close collaboration was the main reason why his company opted for Supervision rather than another tool. “For us, the deciding factor was definitely the speed with which Supervision rolls out new features and how well they listen to our input. And another thing that matters to me: they use a public road map. That allows me to see exactly which feature requests have high priority and when they are expected to be rolled out. Or conversely, which requests are not considered urgent. This allows me and my team to prepare for both cases: I know what will be done soon, and I also know what won’t be done any time soon.”
Because obviously, there are plenty of things the company would like to change down the track. “In future, I’d like to be able to manage other software and applications through Supervision, as well. And there several compliance settings I’d like to see added. But the fact remains that these types of solutions are already making a difference in a complex IT landscape. Major MSPs need to use these types of tools if they want volume, scalability, quality and efficiency.
And on top of that, we really enjoy collaborating with KPN and the other MSPs that contribute to Supervision. It’s definitely more than a product to us. The community aspect is important, as well. It’s not for nothing that KPN and its Partner Network have become the largest Microsoft supplier in the Netherlands. Yes, I’m motivated and inspired by that. Getting things done together, and then benefitting from that collaboration. How good is that?”
