SDT is an Ascot, UK based company formed in 1994 and is focused on providing total IT solutions and IT support services to Small to Medium Enterprises based in London, South East, Berkshire and the Thames Valley. We deliver tailored solutions for this marketplace across a broad mix of technical capabilities; voice, data, network, security hosting and managed services.

Working with leading manufacturers such as EMC, Cisco, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft  SDT can offer their clients an affordable competitive edge and a solid, scalable business solutions for the future.

Having highly technical skills SDT are able to offer design,  implementation and support services from single in-house servers to high availability data centre solutions.

To ensure that SDT can deliver the right solution we make sure that we are suitably qualified by ensuring that we attain the highest accreditations in the technologies that we provide.

 SDT's broad portfolio of products and solutions fall under the following categories:

Managed IT Services

IT should enable your business and empower your employees. Unfortunately, many small and medium sized organisations fail to find the right proactive IT partner and often end up with support agreements from reactive IT support partners, which means that they end up with an inferior and unresponsive service.

Small to Medium sized organisations have traditionally been an underserved segment of the IT outsourcing market. The cost structures and service delivery models of large third-party support organisations make them too expensive for most mid-size businesses, who typically, have smaller IT budgets with which to support IT infrastructure, even though their complexity, sophistication and requirements are comparable to those of larger enterprises.

This need not be the case

SDT's service delivery model, takes full advantage of remote support, and proactive network monitoring, which dramatically reduces IT support costs while offering enterprise-level service from certified, experts in a broad range of technologies.

Finding the right balance

SDT's co-sourcing services allow businesses to find the right balance between in-house and outsourced support by leveraging the capability of in-house IT staff with the in-depth expertise of SDT's engineers. By delivering effective support or consultancy only when needed i.e. providing specialists for critical applications, networking, infrastructure solutions, new project rollouts, staff cover for holiday or sickness, or to assist and advise on system requirements that could otherwise stretch the resources of an internal team. Whether the requirement is for full managed services or co-managed, SDT provides an affordable way to maximise the business value of the IT infrastructure.

Why SDT Makes Sense

SDT's accredited IT professionals have extensive experience in a wide range of technologies, thus providing a high level IT support without the customer having to maintain large internal IT resource, or having to absorb the high cost of outsourcing support from larger support organisations.

Organisations often have sophisticated, enterprise-class IT infrastructures, but cannot always justify having the high costs of additional full-time IT staff with the depth and breadth of technical expertise to provide the IT support that complex systems require.

What Type of agreements - Fixed Price or Flexible Pricing

Historically IT support contracts were based upon a fee being paid per month for what was deemed to be “unlimited support”, this may include a number of on-site visits per month and a SLA (Service Level Agreement) for guaranteed on site response in the event of a system failure. In order to arrive at a monthly cost the IT support company would calculate the approximate site visits and the resources that they need to allocate in any given month. The fixed cost agreements are a reactive service not proactive. The IT support company will need to ensure that systems are maintained with the minimal amount of effort otherwise the support fee will be eroded, this frequently is where corners get cut and as a result reliability can be compromised. It is essential with any fixed price contract to pay close attention to the agreement and identify what is included in the terms of the agreement, otherwise request for work to be carried out may be outside the scope of the agreement and additional charges may be incurred.

A flexible support agreement will certainly provide a high level of proactivity, but as a word of warning, it is essential that controls are put in place to prevent costs escalating. This can easily be achieved by establishing monthly budgets, ensure that authorisation is sought before work is carried out and establish single points of contact. This will ensure that the supplier has a clear understanding of the boundaries to work within and will encourage them to schedule tasks over several months, therefore keeping costs within budget.

How to choose a supplier

This is the difficult bit, as most providers will almost certainly have different ways of doing things and their recommendations will differ considerably from others, this can be confusing, daunting and foster thoughts of incompetence. Shortlist the ones you feel most comfortable with. The best advice we can give is to commence with a trial period, even if this overlaps with the incumbent supplier, this will make it easier to pull out if things don’t go as planned.

Seek references from several satisfied customers (of course they won’t provide a bad reference) but also obtain references from companies in different fields from your own. This will give some comfort as to the suppliers adaptability and breadth of knowledge.

Most importantly a supplier who claims to experienced in certain technologies and actually being experienced are two different things. Clarify what accreditations they have and whether this is applicable to the technologies that you use, or plan to use. This will pay dividends, a supplier that is learning on your time will not only cost you in terms of labour costs, but if things go wrong it could cost you a lot more.