An MSP with a Mission: Managecore’s Quest to Put Customer Accountability Back into the Industry’s DNA

Many organizations today are faced with a frustrating IT dilemma. On one hand, they’re dealing with expectations that migrating their SAP workloads to the cloud will deliver immediate and significant business benefits. Yet when these IT teams actually beg into work with MSPs to migrate and manage their enterprise workloads to the cloud, what they get is a series of unwelcome surprises: unexpected cost and complexity, unmitigated risk, and an implementation process that never seems to deliver on its promises.

SAP cloud migrations can be some of the worst offenders when it comes to promising more than they actually deliver. The leadership team at Managecore is determined to put SAP managed service providers (MSPs) back on the path to doing better by their customers.

Standing Up for MSP Accountability

“The SAP MSP industry plays a vital role in getting SAP customers through the cloud migration process and into generating reliable cloud ROI,” says Frank Powell, President and Partner, Managecore. “But instead of MSPs standing up for their customers and working to make things right, the status quo has evolved into a real lack of accountability.”

“If it’s nobody’s fault, then it’s nobody’s duty to make things better,” says Powell, whose own SAP experience spans more than two decades. “We founded Managecore specifically out of a desire to restore that accountability and put customers back at the center of everything that we do.”

As Powell has pointed out, the most frustrating thing for IT leaders today isn’t the fact that their SAP cloud migrations are running deep into the weeds and ongoing managed services are lackluster. It is the fact that they partnered with an SAP managed service provider (MSP) specifically to avoid this kind of outcome. Yet when things go wrong—as they do in far too many cases—the MSPs entrusted with seeing them through the process and tasked with the daily maintenance of their most critical applications are often more focused on making excuses and ducking blame than proactively avoiding issues all together.

A Different Approach to Client Relationships

What Managecore offers its customers actually covers a familiar set of MSP services and solutions:  SAP Basis managed services; project support for SAP upgrades and implementations, including SAP HANA and S/4HANA transformations; and additional expertise that extends across a wide range of related cloud technology solutions. As a reseller and Premier Partner of Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud solutions, Managecore has built a team of certified cloud engineers, consultants, architects, project managers and other experts with many decades of combined experience specifically implementing SAP on these hyperscale public cloud platforms.

Managecore delivers its clients the practical experience, deep technical expertise, and cutting-edge technology toolsets they need to achieve a smooth and completely transparent SAP cloud journey and steady state support thereafter. The Managecore team typically works with clients long after the initial implementation process, with services that cover the spectrum from targeted SAP consulting, training and education to optimization and troubleshooting services, to administration and monitoring of fully-managed SAP environments via Managecore’s Watchdog platform.

What makes Managecore different and special, Powell says, is the company’s approach to how it serves SAP clients and builds deep client relationships. This is where too many MSPs today are dropping the ball today—and it’s where Managecore is determined to lead the MSP industry back to its customer-centric roots. Many MSPs today are still applying outdated “1990’s management” principles to complex IT landscapes and being reactive to issues – that could potentially put the customer at risk for losing business with unexpected downtime.

4 Keys to Customer-Centric Success

The Managecore team highlights four core principles that exemplify its approach:

Unconditional accountability: Accountability is a bedrock principle for any MSP, or at least it should be. At Managecore, Powell explains, that means doing what’s necessary to deliver projects on-time and on-budget; managing each client’s SAP application as if it was one of the company’s own internal systems; and immediately owning the problem if something goes off track.”Our accountability is the single most important trait that sets us apart from other MSPs,”explains Powell. “This is an industry that has learned to pass the buck and make excuses when projects don’t go as planned, and it’s unfortunate. The best way we know to push back is to lead by example.”

Straight talk and honest assessments: Powell says Managecore works hard to deliver SAP projects where everything happens on time, on budget, and exactly as expected. But when you’re dealing with some of the world’s most complex enterprise applications, in business-critical situations, there will always be a few bumps in the road.

When problems happen, Managecore is committed to keeping clients informed and engaged with honest and plain-spoken assessments of what went wrong, what caused the problem, and how the client’s SAP implementation team intends to put things back on track.

Realistic pricing and project quotes: One of the MSP industry’s most unfortunate practices, Powell stated, is its habit of landing clients with lowball project quotes—and then, once there’s a signed contract in place, driving up the final cost with “unexpected” change orders. When Managecore delivers a proposal with a cost quote, by comparison, it commits to keeping a client’s cloud project spend within 5% of that quoted figure, with no hidden charges and no bait-and-switch tactics.

A team that’s built to compete: According to Managecore Chief Technology Officer Nick Miletich, it’s often common practice for MSPs to nothire veteran engineers but rather generic IT staff with less experienced (and thus less expensive). It’s a tactic that yields significant short-term savings, but in the long run it leaves MSPs less capable of serving customers or delivering quality SAP support.

“You need a lot of skilled people to be able to deliver [quality SAP projects], and our team stands out in that respect,” Miletich says. In fact, he noted, Managecore actually seeks out senior level dual trained SAP and cloud engineers for our delivery team, which extends the company’s capabilities compared to many competitors.

In addition, Miletich says, “We tailor both our project teams and the solution architecture to meet a client on their terms—dealing with their SAP challenges head on, and helping with their baseline technical knowledge and capabilities, to ultimately support their business goals.”

Giving SAP Customers a Simpler Path to Value

According to Powell, Managecore builds on these principles with unique service delivery solutions and methodologies—each of which extends the company’s ability to deliver fast, reliable, cost-effective SAP solutions.

The backbone of this service model is the company’s Watchdog Platform—an automated, cloud-based monitoring solution that Managecore integrates into a client’s SAP environment. Watchdog gives the Managecore team and its customers consistent, real-time visibility into the SAP environment’s performance and health; as well as the ability to create customized, role-specific monitoring dashboards for each stakeholder—from executives to basis administrators. “All of these metrics, and data points are visible to the clients, and Watchdog is a deeply customer-centric solution,” Miletichsays. “We believe that full transparency gives our clients a smoother, faster migration process and overall provides more efficient long-term support.And in any case, openness isn’t a just choice we make,” he added. “It’s part of our organization’s DNA, just as much as our SAP expertise and years of IT experience. It’s the only approach that makes sense to us.”

Managecore also puts a distinctive spin on RISE with SAP, which SAP introduced as an all-inclusive package of applications, technology capabilities, and services designed to drive faster and simpler cloud migrations. While RISE with SAP has, indeed, given many enterprises a critical measure of confidence and clarity around the cloud migration process, it also requires customers to make far-reaching decisions around business processes, SAP upgrades and application packages, and licensing requirements, among many other variables.

Managecore addressed these challenges in a typically customer-centric fashion with its Managecore iQ+ on RISE with SAP offering: a seamless collaborative support package that includes advisory services, SAP monitoring, SAP security services, and many other capabilities to complement a RISE with SAP solution. The result is a RISE with SAP experience that truly gives customers a simpler, lower risk, more predictable path to value and innovation in the cloud of their choice.

A Worthy Goal: No More SAP ‘Nightmare Scenarios’

According to Powell, there is a real sense of satisfaction in giving SAP customers an impactful chance to elevate and transform their businesses with a cloud strategy. And he added, there is no lack of opportunities to practice the company’s customer-centric approach with each of our managed services customers. “We entered one engagement with a large distribution company that managed no less than three full- scale data centers,” Powell recalled. “The company was being crippled, quite literally, with outages to their critical SAP systems and long stretches of unplanned downtime.”

Managecore moved fast with a detailed investigation and analysis, advising the client to migrate its enterprise applications to a more stable and reliable public cloud solution.  At the same time, Managecore told the client there was no better time to also upgrade its core database environment from Oracle to SAP HANA, to take advantage of one planned downtime that would also get them further performance enhancements to their new SAP environment on the cloud.

While customers still might view SAP migrations as nightmare scenarios, Powell and his team sees their approach—built on accountability, transparency, and trust—as a better way to solve even the hardest problems. And in this case, Managecore’s approach didn’t just consolidate three data centers to the cloud and implement a business-critical SAP HANA system. It delivered an outcome that transformed the customer’s SAP reliability and performance, drastically reduced its costs, and added much-needed flexibility to sustain the company’s growth. “We trust our process, lean on our team’s expertise and experience, and always put the customer first,” Powell says. “And the results speak for themselves, over and over again.”

Looking Ahead: High Hopes and Higher Expectations

In terms of what comes next, Powell noted, part of Managecore’s value to its customers is to ensure they benefit from new technology, when and where it’s appropriate. Right now, that involves a major push to elevate its SAP automation and orchestration capabilities, especially in areas such as backup and recovery where manual processes and low error tolerance make an ideal use case for automation tools.

At the same time, Powell says, the company sees its customer-centric approach and bedrock principles as vital differentiators for an MSP industry that faces a growing stigma for its business-as-usual shortcomings. “We think the industry is up for some curveballs in the times ahead. They have to answer some crucial and consequential questions,” Powell states. “And we hope customers demand more accountability than they’ve been getting in the past.”