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with upward of 50,000 visitors descend-
ing upon the community every weekend.
It’s also a popular film location.
“Tybee is a movie destination – a
location for everything from
SpongeBob
to
Baywatch
to
Bad Grandpa
, because
directors can make it look like California
and pay half the fees,” Fletcher said.
Working with Speros, the City of
Tybee Island rents its network as a
service, offloading switch management
and day-to-day network maintenance
activities while enabling the city’s IT
department to affordably keep up with
data-rich demands on the network.
“Our island has quickly grown into a
very popular tourist destination, and we
need the network backbone necessary
to support thousands of users on a daily
basis,” said Todd Smith, information tech-
nology director for the City of Tybee Island.
“As a small IT department, we required
a complete infrastructure and managed
service that could help offload the man-
agement of our switches, while also pro-
viding a cost-effective solution to meet the
needs for everyone on the island.
“An ADTRAN network as a service
offers us a really powerful infrastructure
and arms us with the capacity we’ll need
to grow for the future, all without the
headache of traditional capital expen-
ditures,” he continued. “And by working
with Speros, we can operate like a large
IT department without having to add any
more staff, while remaining confident in
our ability to keep up with the network
demands of tourists, city officials and
vital public safety services.”
Whether it is high network traffic de-
mand during the peak tourism season or
a natural disaster, the City of Tybee Island
needed a service that could be accessed
anywhere in the case of an emergency.
ADTRAN’s ProCloud Subscription Ser-
vices provide the platform for Speros to
manage and maintain all of the city’s in-
stalled switches, creating a holistic view
of the network and alleviating pressure
on the city’s IT department. Additionally,
the city’s network will be able to support
more mobile devices from tourists and
the vital applications for local police and
EMS units that are critical to the city
government’s infrastructure, including IP
cameras, traffic monitoring systems and
license plate readers.
MSPs Beyond Hardware
From a pure tech perspective, cloud
and mobility are coming together so
that companies are accessing apps
and the data that they’re relying on and
storing via a new set of end user tech-
nologies – specifically, tablets and mo-
bile phones. And that opens the door
for MSPs to offer services that leverage
this new infrastructure.
“There are so many organizational
changes in the market,” said Team-
LogicIT COO Frank Picarello. “It wasn’t
that many years ago that your business
size revenue was tied to the number of
employees you had. We’re seeing that
change radically. A company may only
have 15 or 20 workers and outsource
many parts of their business. So their
reliance on IT is much greater than it
was. It’s not uncommon to see a manu-
facturer that doesn’t manufacture any-
thing. It’s a huge opportunity for leverag-
ing IT quite differently.”
TeamLogicIT, via its primary partner,
CloudJumper, offers a remote desktop
offering for the mobile workforce. Pi-
carello said that the sales approach is
fundamentally different in an MSP world.
“We don’t believe the marketplace
likes to buy workstation-as-a-service,”
said Picarello. “They want to buy what
it does. They’ll say, 20 of my employees
are on the road all the time, and we
want them to have the same compre-
hensive IT experience that they have
in the office. Can we deploy something
via a tablet or mobile? If you talk about
content-rich, user-rich data and applica-
tions to any device, they get that.”
He also said that in terms of mon-
etization, demonstrating value is fairly
straightforward.
“When a client is making a decision
to spend, say, $150 per user per month,
and you get a managed service – as
opposed to client-server architecture,
traditional laptops and apps hosted lo-
cally – it should be worth more because
you’re helping the end user operate
more efficiently,” he said. “This isn’t a
VoIP scenario where you price it low to
gain adoption.”
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