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Case Study: Navakai Inc.
Business Development
 The Challenge: Deliver a comprehensive and affordable network maintenance solution.
Given perpetual advances in information technology, keeping up with small and midsize business demands is a never-ending endeavor. Despite the best efforts of managed services providers, there can sometimes appear to be a disconnection between what’s possible and what’s practical.
Navakai Inc., a Colorado Springs, Co., provider of outsourced managed IT, has a customer base that is split between SMB owners and IT professionals. Both groups share an interest in holding down expenditures while needing robust IT environments.
In the latter part of 2007, Navakai began seeking a network maintenance product that would provide robust functionality at a reasonable cost. Co-owner and President Shawn Morland says, “We were building network management stations for our clients using WhatsUp, Somix, and Kiwi. However the cost was so great that it only appealed to 10 percent of our customers. Combined, the maintenance of these tools — with reporting — was labor intensive and greatly reduced our margins.”
The Solution
Navakai has been using ConnectWise with great success since May of 2007. “It increased our efficiency by improving our processes,” Shawn notes. He remains impressed with ConnectWise’s capability to tie business operations together and deliver accountability.
At the 2007 ConnectWise Partner Summit, Navakai was introduced to Cisco Monitor Director (CMD), a comprehensive data and voice services remote monitoring and management solution for SMB customers.
When he learned that ConnectWise integrates with CMD, Shawn’s interest grew. “In the past, using products that didn’t integrate created a whole lot of duplicate effort that decreased our efficiency,” Shawn explains. The potential benefits of putting CMD together with ConnectWise were obvious.
The integration of CMD and ConnectWise enables managed services providers to centralize, manage and report all essential components of their solution offerings to reduce complexity, increase productivity and maximize their return on investment. Navakai began testing CMD in November and the integration with ConnectWise went smoothly.
The Cisco product also impressed Shawn with its functionality at an affordable price. “It’s easy to manage, installs fast, and quickly identifies issues.” He is especially pleased that integration with ConnectWise allows for creation of monthly network health reports — a crucial feature Shawn saw as notably lacking in other solution packages.
The Results
At the outset, Navakai had two objectives: increase revenue and increase subscriptions for more network visibility. Shawn says, “We completed the restructuring of our solution using CMD in late February. In a matter of 60 days we sold our network maintenance subscription to quite a few of our customers — new and existing.”
While Shawn says Navakai has yet to experience a “save-the-day” moment using ConnectWise and CMD, he has seen how the combination prevents such days of peril from occurring in the first place. “We were surprised to find that several of our customers had network issues that we were not aware of because they could not afford network maintenance before,” he reports.
Shawn notes, “I am finding new ways to improve my business operations almost weekly. ConnectWise has changed my business and has played an important role in making it more profitable and viable.” The combination of ConnectWise and Cisco Monitor Director is proving to be another good example.
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