Reducing the time it takes to buy new technology

In the technology marketplace today there are hundreds and thousands of suppliers and vendors offering up their tools and services. Many times, they all start to blend together while leveraging marketing key words like security, cloud and digital. While portions of their services and tools may be relevant in these spaces, it can be very difficult to navigate the selection process of identifying the right provider for your needs.

One of our services is technology advisory and brokerage services. That offering is directly geared towards accelerating the time to value and reducing the workload on your team while acquiring and onboarding new technology. So how can you receive this value? The ATG team serves as a partner to your organization from the beginning of the process to increase productivity, reduce costs and optimize the process to acquire these solutions. Areas in which we provide support for our clients:

• Requirements Gathering – We sit with your team to gather requirements and create the necessary documentation to ensure prospective vendors have the appropriate level of understanding of your needs. Doing this once with ATG eliminates the need to get on multiple calls with every supplier repeating your needs like a broken record.
• Vendor Identification – Our team has a large database of pre-vetted solution providers outlining their key markets of operations, capabilities, points of contact and other key demographics. We can quickly engage the right subset of solution providers for your needs delivering the top 3 options for solution review & potential negotiations. No longer do you need to spend hours searching for potential suppliers and then working through their corporate websites to find the right sales person in your market.
• Vendor Presentations, Solutioning & Quotes – As a partner of yours, our team can work with the vendors to ensure that you receive the right level of insight on their capabilities and have a clear understand of apples to apples across your solution providers. Furthermore, our team can assist in assisting or directly engaging on your behalf to gather quotes and solution designs from the vendors. This activity typically involves a number of touchpoints which can be eliminated or reduced with the proper level of documentation and requirements gathering upfront. Additionally, our team has spent hours working with various providers throughout the years touring facilities, meeting with teams and educating ourselves to ensure we can properly and throughly consult your team throughout the process.
• Vendor Negotiations & Selection – The ATG team has spent years negotiating contracts & services as both suppliers and customers which provides us with a unique prospective to ensure that our customers, and you, can receive the right solutions with negotiated pricing and terms that meet your individual needs. We are able to tap into market pricing, existing relationships and peer insights in order to more effectively come to the table to support your team.
• Service Implementation & Transition – Standing up new services with an MSP can always be painful. Typically the first 60 – 90 days will be challenging while both the customer team and service provider learn more about their new engagement. With that, ATG has a number of lessons learned and templates which reduce the burden and pain felt during the onboarding and implementation phase of a new service. We also have resources on our team that can work directly with the MSP on-boarding team to serve as a conduit for additional escalations and support.
• Business As Usual & Changes – You are fully onboarding and found the business as usual cadence. During this phase, our team will conduct quarterly reviews to ensure you are receiving the service levels and support as expected during the contracting phase. Furthermore, our team supports our clients with needed service or contract change requests as business adapts and changes.
• Renewals & End of Contract – As the end of the contract term approaches, there are several strategic steps that may be taken to ensure you maintain leverage for end of contract changes or during the renewal process. Many times, clients have changed over time and need to negotiate new terms, services or pricing. Our team works with yours to identify the needed changes for future needs and then coordinates the steps in order to support the re-negotiation and contracting of services. This may include going back to a requirements gathering stage, contacting new suppliers and initiating negotiations for pricing, service and terms.