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Businesses must increasingly do more with less in today’s competitive environment, especially when it comes to headcount dedicated to managing and maintaining complex communications systems. Outsourcing these functions can consistently upgrade your coverage from a single employee’s 8-5 window to the 24/7 peace of mind Carousel Managed Services provides.

In addition, the costs of owning and maintaining the infrastructure required to properly monitor your systems’ health and status are becoming prohibitive. When you factor in labor, hardware and software required to monitor and manage the typical enterprise network, it’s no wonder businesses throughout the United States are looking to Carousel to provide a consistent, reasonable monthly expense for their complete communications solution.

Some find predictability boring. We disagree. How often have you spent hours resolving an unplanned, high-profile outage? Nobody wants to be diverted from an important project to triage your reputation from negative publicity generated by out-of-date software or a security breach. With Carousel Managed Services, Carousel’s NOC monitors all of your systems simultaneously and alerts you of any anomalies immediately, in addition to performing administrative updates to your system to keep your software at peak performance.

Carousel’s Managed Services transfers day-to-day related management responsibility from your plate to ours as a strategic method to improve your operation’s efficiency and effectiveness. Our program ensures a fixed monthly cost devoted to your communications systems, allowing you to create a budget and stick to it. We tailor our extensive portfolio of services into an offering which mitigates your risk and reduces your overall cost. Carousel’s Managed Services allow you to do more with less – the formula for success while minimizing your stress.

Carousel’s Managed Services Program Portfolio includes:

Help Desk

Give your administrators someone to call when they need a helping hand. Carousel’s Managed Services team is standing by to provide detailed support when you have a general usability or software application-specific question from your end users. Documentation not helping? Give us a call and we’ll walk you through the issue, providing advice on best practices, clarifying your understanding of features and programming, or providing password resets for supported systems. Trust Carousel’s engineering team to be the knowledgeable, responsive source of help you need to keep your communications running smoothly.

Single Point of Contact (SPOC)

Often the quality of support you receive is dependent on the people you interact with every day to keep your network running as it should. It’s important to be have access to people who understand your system, are familiar with the history, and understand why things are the way they are. Carousel can work with you to designate dedicated service teams that are staffed with just the right resources to match the systems you have deployed.

We provide you with a designated customer service team that knows your systems, network, staff and most importantly, your expectations. This familiarity and relationship generates fast and personalized service and each maintenance case is handled efficiently and effectively.

Software Release Management (SRM)

One of the biggest headaches associated with today’s software and firmware-based platforms is the time and energy spent trying to make sure it’s all kept updated. Unfortunately, nobody wants to be first applying the new service packs either. Carousel’s SRM program reduces the total cost of support by eliminating the time you would normally spend on managing the update process. We test manufacturer patches in our labs first, making sure the software works. Then we can automate the process of deploying it to your systems, notifying you of their existence and telling you why they’re appropriate for you. In short, we proactively identify, assess, and implement recommended updates that maximize your applications performance and minimize your risk of potential service disruptions

Save aspirin and let Carousel take the worry out of making sure all your systems have the latest appropriate software releases.

Activity Reports

Adopting complex technology doesn’t have to mean complexity for your reporting requirements. True, the need for centralized reporting generates more servers for your Admins to maintain, but Carousel’s Managed Services group can provide typical or customized reporting that gives you the information you need to make effective decisions. Find out which systems require the most administrative effort, track uptime, track time to response, and more.

Today’s advanced Business Intelligence packages let us show you what you need, when you need to see it. We provide comprehensive detailed reports on all service activity, including break/fix and/or MAC tickets, designated by location. Reports include data such as ticket opened date, work requested, work performed, and ticket completed date.

Moves, Adds and Changes (MACs)

Nobody wants to pay a bill every time they request help with a simple administrative change, especially if it’s done remotely (as most are these days). Carousel’s Managed Service MACs are tailored around taking the day-to-day administrative workload off your network managers, leaving them free to focus on strategic initiatives that let you take better advantage of your existing infrastructure. Carousel’s advanced NOC systems let us automate many tasks, and even if it’s not automated you may just find that it gets done faster when you let Carousel handle the job.

Unlimited MACs reduces costs and eliminates “per incident” vendor invoices for moves, adds and changes. We deliver unlimited remote software MACs and onsite hardware MACs that otherwise would be performed by your internal staff or outsourced on a T&M basis, saving you time and money.

Vendor Agency

Single-vendor solutions are rare these days. Most customers select the most appropriate vendor for each segment of their communications enterprise. This can result in trouble tickets that involve three, four, or more vendors troubleshooting a multi-site call path or data flow. Carousel can take the direct management of each of those vendors off your hands, using our existing relationships to get things done on your behalf. Managed services should be about peace of mind, and in this case Carousel takes the worry out of complex vendor relationships, especially with Telco and network service providers.

Backup Storage

Most software and hardware-based communications and networking platforms have been supporting remote or flash-based backups for some time. However, many customers have no facility to hold those backups at a location other than where the platforms are located. This creates a potential problem in that if there were a natural disaster or other significant event, the backups might be rendered unavailable. Carousel now offers remote offsite backup for many of the products we already support! Depending on your system type and version, Carousel can store one or more of your latest backups at our NOC facility, so it’s there for us to restore for you when the time comes. In case of a massive hardware failure, we can also use that backup to restore a system from our warehouse and ship it straight to you, greatly reducing return to service time over having to get a backup to us in real time.

Our Data Backup Storage can help you implement enterprise-wide disaster recovery routines with minimal cost and efforts. We provide a uniform process, available 24X7, for the storage and retrieval of critical backup files. In the event of serious system failure, we can quickly retrieve the most recent backup file from an encrypted, password-protected web portal and upload it to your system, restoring service in just minutes.

Data Backup Storage is only available for Avaya Version 13 or higher.