John Casey

John Casey, sales manager with Datapac, said that while IT budgets seemed to be tight, Datapac's managed services offering continued to grow in popularity.

"While other areas of our business have slowed down a bit due to tightening of budgets in a lot of customers, the one part of our business that is increasing rapidly is managed services," said Casey.
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Organisations facing restrictions in hiring new IT staff could find dealing with an MSP a more affordable and efficient option, Casey said.

"You cannot compare the cost of the managed services agreement with the cost of actually hiring somebody to do that job," he said.
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Casey said that today's managed services offerings had grown out of traditional maintenance and support agreements.

"Managed services started for us 20 years ago, when we started selling maintenance contracts on networks or equipment that we supplied," he said.
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Casey said a managed services arrangement precluded smaller companies from having to take on an expensive full-time IT expert.

"It is borderline whether a small to medium-sized company with 30 or less users should have their own dedicated IT staff member," he said.
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Casey said that these arrangements typically freed up IT staff to engage in more strategic tasks.

"These people do not need to be checking if back-ups have been done or if anti-virus patches are up to date, or whether the servers are functioning properly," he said.
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The best managed services relationships are based on good communication, according to Casey.

"We would be in constant contact with the client," he said.

"Traditionally, maintenance contracts have been the first step towards outsource engagements of any size," said sales manager John Casey.
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"It is the single biggest driver for outsourcing, because getting quality staff is nigh on impossible," said Casey.
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John Casey, of Datapac, has seen the change.

"The bigger firms are definitely not as expensive as they would have been and they are coming down the value chain.We're meeting them around the upper-level opportunities where we wouldn't have seen them before," he said.

In a country where Bank of Ireland/HP deals are few and far between, there is no mystery as to why this has occurred.

"Basically, the Irish market isn't that big and we're chasing the same pieces of business," he said.

"We see a lot of consumer use but, while companies have become more prone to considering them, we haven't seen many using them," said John Casey, sales manager at Datapac.

Casey said the devices have become far more attractive to users in recent times due to prices dropping.
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"People who are into photography, or some other activity that involves creating big files, find them particularly useful," said Casey.

"People buying digital cameras and camcorders online are tending to buy external hard drives along with them," he said.
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Despite the wider appeal of the devices among consumers, Casey said he does not expect businesses to become interested in external hard drives."Interest is very much driven by the consumer end of the market and I can't see there being a surge in corporate demand," he said.

"Smaller firms who run out of space on servers might find a use for them, but there are other problems that businesses need to look at," said Casey.

Most consumers work and most workers double in life as consumers, so bringing a device more typically found in a domestic environment into the office can be tricky.This is particularly true when it comes to portable devices such as external hard drives.

"The businesses don't know what they are plugging into their devices and likewise the owners don't know what will end up on their hard drive as a result of being plugged into an office computer," said Casey."It's a big no-no for sure."

John Casey, sales manager with Datapac, said: "From a security point of view, companies are beginning to take the importance of protecting data more seriously."

"It just makes great sense, with fewer skilled people wasting their valuable time in cars and vans," said John Casey, managed services sales manager of Datapac.

"We can deliver an even better service because we are working directly from the skills' pool while the client can get better value without all of those travel costs.

"Since broadband made so much more possible, the range of IT services has expanded, for example to the hosting of Microsoft Exchange and the security filtering of e-mail."

Datapac has been seeing the acceptance of IT managed services moving progressively up the market, according to Casey, with mid-sized enterprises and organisations of all kinds accepting the business and technical arguments.

Pictured from left: Killian Boland, Director/Financial Controller, Herbert Park Hotel and John Casey, Sales Manager, Datapac.
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"We focus on providing clients with high-calibre service and results that build long-term client relationships" says John Casey, Sales Manager, Datapac.

Pictured from left: Kevin Gregory, IT Manager at Hamilton Osborne King and John Casey, Sales Manager, Datapac.

John CaseyDatapac Hilton HouseArdee Road