Managed providers are good at keeping things running. They are not usually building you anything. Somewhere in the monthly bill is work that recurs because nobody has built the thing that would stop it recurring.
The shape of it
- A ticket that gets raised every month for the same reason.
- Manual steps performed by someone external because no system does them.
- Reporting assembled by hand and invoiced as a service.
- A dependency that grows because nothing is ever built to end it.
What we do about it
We build the software the recurring work was standing in for, against the systems you already run. You own the code, the infrastructure and the deployment at the end of it.
This is not a replacement for a managed provider. Keeping infrastructure healthy is real work and worth paying for. It is a replacement for paying a person, month after month, to do something a system should do once.
What you own afterwards
- The source, the deployment and the documentation.
- The ability to run it without us, and a team trained to.
- A reason to renegotiate what the provider is actually for.
Where this fits
Most common in businesses carrying real compliance load and real system count: professional services, financial services and legal. See also cloud infrastructure.
Common questions
Do we have to leave our provider?
No, and most do not. The point is that you stop paying for recurring manual work, not that you stop paying for infrastructure to be looked after.
Who owns what you build?
You do. Source, infrastructure, deployment and documentation, handed over with training so your team can run it independently.
What if our provider built the current systems?
That is common. We work alongside them where that makes sense and around them where it does not. Either way what we build is yours.
Where to next
Tell us what the work looks like now and we will tell you plainly what can be built and what cannot. Start a brief, or see how we work.