Professional Services Team

Taking plans to reality

The company maintains a Solutions Architecture Team and a Professional Services Team that, working in concert with the company’s Chief Technology Officer, deliver highly architected IT projects on time and on budget. 

The Professional Services Team at Key Info provides a wide variety of specialized services to assist our clients achieve their IT objectives on-budget and on-time. This Team works closely with the Solutions Architect Team and client personnel to build effective project teams for client work.

Services

Identify and implement best practice solutions for these technologies:

• Storage
• Virtualization
• Security
• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
• Systems integration
• Performance tuning
• Data center operation and support
• Systems planning
• Remote system administration

Benefits

• Improved business performance
• Top notch management of your most crucial computing resources, optimizing system availability
• Testing of solutions in an advanced environment
• Reduced operational costs for:
  • Power
  • Cooling
  • Floor Space
• Leveraging knowledge and experience of subject matter experts
• Holistic solutions that are properly planned and implemented
• Improved regulatory compliance
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
• Workload assigned to Key Info and internal IT staff to maximize operational efficiency
• Maximizing ROI on hardware/software expenditures
• Achieve 24X7 support
• Pre and Post Implementation Delivery Methodology ensures best practices and consistent quality for long-term enterprise data center architectural design.

BPIC

Advanced testing of proposed new configurations is performed at the company's Business Partner Innovation Center (BPIC) test center, where advanced technical solutions are proved, new client hardware is preconfigured prior to delivery and clients are able to conduct their own testing. Co-located in the BPIC test center is our PureSystems Competency Center.

People

Bios for all Professional Services Team members are located under Who We Are > People > Engineers on the Key Info website. The Team is managed by John Agsalud, Director of Professional Services. He can be reached at jagsalud@keyinfo.com.

Technical Assessment Services  

Providing extensive expertise for better IT infrastructure

We recently concluded a Network/Systems/Storage/Staffing Assessment at Spectrum Group International, a consolidated global collectibles network, specializing in coins, bullion, stamps and wine. Allison Watanabe, CIO at SGI told us, “I challenged Key Info to complete an assessment of my Network/Systems infrastructure and personnel in one day. They met that challenge and gave me documented recommendations that I now can execute on. Excellent work, I’m a very happy customer.” This response was encouraging, as it confirmed we were on the right track with our approach to quick technical assessments for our clients.

The Technical Assessment Services offered by our Solution Architects at Key Info are organized into the following areas:

•        High Availability: Level of availability required by your organization
•        Data Protection: Level of backup and recovery that is best for your organization
•        Disaster Recovery: Level of readiness needed for recovering from catastrophic failure and ability to respond
•        Server Environments: Choosing the right operating system/hardware infrastructure for your organization
•        Consolidation and Virtualization: Use of virtualization and SAN/NAS and other file storage strategies to
         optimally consolidate server and storage resources for your organization
•        PureSystems Assessment: In-depth assessment performed by Key Info Solutions Architects in connection with
         client staff.

Each assessment begins with the assembly of the Technical Assessment Team. Then we follow the formal Assessment Methodology described below.

Data Gathering: We start with a thorough understanding of your business requirements, your current IT challenges, and your expected outcome from the assessment initiative.

Team Building: Based on the information gathered, Key Info builds a team of subject matter experts to drive the project and deliverables to completion. Our Technical Assessments are performed by a hand-picked team of Solution Architects and Engineers designed to assess the specific IT resources within a specific client setting.

Assessments are conducted in five main steps: project kick-off, qualitative interviews, quantitative data gathering, formulating the recommendations and presenting the findings to the key stakeholders.

Project Kick-off: First, Key Info will host a project kick-off meeting with the CIO and infrastructure team along with our principle Key Info subject matter experts identified for the assignment to ensure the collective team understands the specific steps required to conduct the assessment, the roles and responsibilities each team member will play, the identified deliverables, and the timeline in which to deliver the assessment findings to the decision makers.

Qualitative Analysis: With our experience, expertise and ability to design a long term enterprise architectural design and strategy, Key Info performs a qualitative analysis of the environment by interviewing the CIO and the infrastructure team to assess day-to-day operations, obtain a clear picture of the current IT infrastructure, understand existing pain points, evaluate the day-to-day operations and staff. Key Info will create a comprehensive SWOT Analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) of the focused areas in the assessment, and also document unbiased observations of the environment based on what is in the project scope. Our team of architects and engineers work closely together to ensure our analysis covers all specified areas.

Documentation Collection: Key Info will request all available documentation of the existing infrastructure in order to get a clear picture of the environment. In addition, Key Info may request to conduct quantitative analysis of the environment by deploying non-intrusive tools into the infrastructure to retrieve more detailed configurations of the environment for identified areas that are in scope of the assessment. In this case, Key Info will meet with the administrators of the environment to conduct a dry-run of the tool in a test environment to ensure the expectations of what is collected and how the tool is used are clearly understood and agreed upon by the collective team.

Report Results: Lastly, following the thorough collection of qualitative and quantitative data, the Key Info Technical Assessment Team creates the project deliverables providing detailed recommendations to align your business objectives to what the IT environment will require to adjust to achieve the long term vision and business objectives.

Contact Julie Gutierrez-Farley if you want to learn more about Technical Assessments here at Key Info.