Technology Start Up Tackles Maintenance & Software Strangleholds

VPS is a new start up with the vision of helping companies to rein in on the over burdening costs of maintaining their technology assets. They employ a two pronged approach and a welcoming pay for performance model.

SAP today announced that it has postponed planned price
increases for its Enterprise Support maintenance program, and
may even go to a tiered pricing model. Oracle is extracting huge
maintenence dollars knowing their clients have invested too much to turn away. With the Sun acquisition, Oracle is expected to grow the most profitable portion of that business by using the same strategy. According to NetApp's most recent financial reports, they showed a higher than average profit margin from maintenance and software.

There are many technology bretheren in the hardware and software arenas are showing declines in business product revenues, yet their maintenance revenues are showing strong growth.

The signficant take away regarding this information is that the reining in of IT maintenance costs is no longer on the wish list of the CIO, it has now become a necessity for survival.

Hardware and Software maintenance services hit the Income
Statement as an operating expense. Keeping these expenses in line
can sometimes be an overly complex process. There are overlapping
solutions, declining budgets, understaffed departments of all sizes, and limitations of skills and resources to negotiate
these contracts down.

This describes the baseline for the typical David and
Golaith story; ie; The prominent leaders in technology have an
unchallenged stranglehold on the vulnerable organizations that
rely on their solutions.

Which brings us to an interesting new company called Virtual Procurement Services. The principal behind the company, Mr. Scott Robins, has had a distinguished, successful career working for Leading Technology VAR's. As a Top Sales Leader, he enjoyed the revenue stream created by selling the exceedingly profitable maintenance contracts for technology vendors such as IBM, Netapp, Oracle, Sun, HP, Dell, Microsoft,VMware, etc. (all brands VPS works with)

When the economy turned down, Mr. Robins quickly realized his expertise combined with the right software tool could help reduce his customers OP-X (operational) budgets with certainty and immediacy. His company VPS, developed a proprietary pricing tool that re-calculates costs associated with tehcnology assets in-term. If your contract is new, or one year into a three year deal, VPS has the ability to reprice the number for you.
Once a savings are found, the company uses secret inner workings of contracted vendors to achieve significant savings.

"We were just laying low, focusing on a few specific clients that my team knew needed our help, and now we are getting inquiries that run the gamut, from one off applications where typically we can not help, to our sweet spot, which is hardware and software tied to organization infrastuctures. We now have few fortune companies with carefully crafted procurement arms looking leverage the VPS tool and our negotiating expertise.

Our customers are happy with the results, and they know
that when there are no savings to be had, or we have no knowledge
of the product or application, we are quick to remind them of what our core specialties are, but leave them informed that it just may make the radar soon.

Today, we do not have any competition. There is no other company that invested in a similar tool, or that has the negotiation strategies and the understanding of the VAR/Manufacturer marketplace that we do. We also do not take any money uprfont", Scott Robins states.

The economy may be taking a slow turn now to put us in a better place, however it is reassuring to know that there are resources like VPS to turn to. The business model represents itself as an easily identifiable step towards reclaiming portions of the investments companies have made in their technology assets, while also offering to empower the Davids of the corporate world once again.


Virtual Procurement Services can be found at www.vprocurement.com
Scott Robins, CEO, takes private submissions at srobins@vprocurement.com or 203-395-9670
Theresa Gallo, Author

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