Success Stories

Success Story: Quantenna Communications

Difficulties with Existing IT Service Provider
Quantenna was a start-up company with approximately 80 employees and remote sites in Taiwan, Australia, and India. They had been receiving outsourced IT services from an off-shore IT Service Provider for several years. However, the VP of Engineering was starting to notice an increasing number of problems in the quality of IT service including more and more complaints from users about lack of response to questions and trouble tickets. Finally, there was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” – there was a failure with their storage system, and the IT Service Provider was unable to restore the data because of an ineffective backup system. Quantenna lost valuable engineering data which cost them significantly in time and dollars.

Possible Alternatives
Quantenna considered hiring an internal IT employee, but realized that one or even two people could not provide the 24×7 monitoring, response and management of the IT assets needed, as well as work on IT projects that had been stalled for months. In addition, there were various technical skill sets needed by the company, including providing more Engineering Application support. It would be impossible to find all that resident in one or two IT employees, no matter how good they were.

Solution: Professional, High Quality IT Services
Quantenna’s VP of Engineering was referred to SPK and Associates and asked them to come in with a proposal to provide Managed IT Services for all of Quantenna’s network, as well as to provide additional IT project services.

When SPK came on site, there were a number of issues to clean up:

  • Failing backup system
  • Continual problems with network connectivity
  • A pile of user trouble tickets that had been stacking up
  • Problems with job management on their Engineering compute farm
  • And so on…

Within 3 months, Quantenna’s network was humming like a machine and the user community was extremely satisfied with the quality of service they were receiving. SPK set up exhaustive monitoring on all services within Quantenna’s IT network, resulting in the proactive addressing of issues before they became critical problems for Quantenna’s engineers. SPK’s ticketing and escalation procedure ensured that no problem “fell through the cracks”. SPK assigns Primary and Secondary engineers to all clients, ensuring that there is always someone available that has deep knowledge of the client’s technical needs and personnel. 24×7 response is more than having an 800 number for the client to call… it is having well established communication, response, and escalation policies in place to ensure that every IT issue at our clients is handled professionally and efficiently.

The decision to switch IT service providers is always uncertain and carries a certain amount of risk. In the case of Quantenna, the difference in their IT infrastructure within 3 months was so significant that there was never any looking back.