A New Take On An Old Problem

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

In a column written for the August, 2013 issue of Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine (Outsourced IT Support: Two Common, Costly Mistakes), I suggested the potential peril suffered by businesses that insult the value of their technology investments by treating the care and feeding of those investments as a part-time afterthought. I also suggested that looking to “big, national ‘retail’ IT service providers” was a bad idea. After receiving some flak from my friends in the IT services industry for having penned that sentence, some clarification is in order.  

I didn’t mean big, national providers of IT services for retailers, (i.e. Acuative, DirectSource, NCR Managed Services, etc.).

What I meant—and what I should have written—is that I don’t advise businesses to contract with big, national office equipment retailers for IT support, despite their attempts to market IT services to the business sector (i.e. Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Staples Tech Support Services, OfficeMax ctrlcenter).

As stated in the aforementioned column, there are too many great IT service providers with industry-specific expertise—staffed by technicians with business technology-specific experience and certifications—to entrust your IT infrastructure to a 20-year-old part-timer who happens to know his way around a network pretty well.

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