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As the managed services world is still defining itself, Green Beacon Solutions is redefining its corner of it.
Green Beacon, 4-year-old CRM (customer relationship management) solution provider, is rolling out an offering—PAMS (Professional Application Management Services)—that is neither a solution delivery nor MSP (managed services provider) contract.
Part consultation, part monitoring, part implementation, PAMS, which Green Beacon expects to launch in April, is designed to help customers apply the solution to the business purpose for which it was purchased, and its creators expect it to multiply the value of CRM for countless midsize customers with limited IT resources.
“How many customers can afford to buy a solution but cant afford to own it?” said Ben Holtz, president and CEO of Green Beacon. “They have bought the box solution, but they dont have the $85,000 a year to keep an Onyx Software administrator on staff, who would be able to let them use it the way they would have hoped. When you need to change a field, you need to tweak a business rule in the program, you need to investigate a bug—often these things just stay that way.”
PAMS essentially provides subscription access to an administrator who can perform those tasks on an incident basis.
Unlike service contracts and MSP offerings, PAMS does not support a companys infrastructure, monitor system performance or back up a customers data. The service would require some monitoring of systems and applications that support CRM, such as SQL Server, “but were not replacing your IT department,” Holtz said.
For a subscription (Green Beacon expects to charge between $6,000 to $10,000 per month), users receive a limited number of incidents (up to 16 hours of work), which would include any one of about 40 defined projects, from adding fields to the screen to reindexing the database.