:: Home >> IT Consulting

san jose, bay area, california it consulting services for:
enterprise, mid-market, and small businesses

Why do you need an IT partner?

Whether you have a large enterprise, a mid-market or small business, information technology can play a critical role in helping your business succeed. The question is, do you need IT consultants or staff to make the most of the technology? The answer depends on many factors, including your type of business, your organization, budget, business and technology challenges and what you need in the way of a solution or solutions.

Consider what a PlanetMagpie partnership can do for you. We can address all major IT issues such as compliance, data integrity, Microsoft product upgrade and migration and integration for Exchange, Active Directory, Windows and SQL.

Adding value to your business

If you have IT specialists, we can complement their efforts, taking over routine, time-intensive duties, including software patches as well as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues, so your staff can focus on the daily operation. If you don't have IT specialists, we can offer a cost-effective alternative to hiring full-time dedicated staff.

Applying best practices

If initiatives such as network security updates and data backup maintenance end up on your company's "to-do" list, you could be putting your business at risk in the event of a disaster or Sarbanes-Oxley audit. The same can be true if the documentation on your IT procedures is sketchy, making it difficult to reproduce the procedures or to troubleshoot. At PlanetMagpie, we can put industry recognized best practices into place to ensure your business is protected.

 Keeping up to date and global on technology

Most IT specialists in companies have little time to explore technology and related applications beyond what is installed in their organization. At PlanetMagpie, our business is knowledge, keeping current on:

• What's available in the market
• What the technology can and can't do for a variety of applications
• What works for our customers and what doesn't.

We can provide the big and little picture on solutions and possibilities as your business evolves.

Finding the best solution

Our goal is to provide our customers with a tailored solution or solutions for the long term. We're not locked into using one particular solution or one particular vendor. We have partnerships with many the leading technology suppliers in the world, providing a deep resource for creating what each customer needs.

Putting extensive experience to work

When you partner with PlanetMagpie, you get the combined technology and business experience of people who have worked with a wide variety of applications, systems, solutions and challenges. You get a partner dedicated to the highest standards. For example, we were implementing Sarbanes-Oxley best practices before there was Sarbanes-Oxley. You can get a partner dedicated to your business.

Ask our customers

Our customer list includes small, mid-market and enterprise organizations, across many industries.

How we work

We have years of IT experience and knowledge gained through working with a vast array of technology and solutions as well as businesses of all sizes and in a variety of industries. With expertise and our extensive research of how other top IT consultants go about helping customers maximize their investment, we have developed best practices that we utilize for every project.

Part of those best practices are based on an understanding that the most effective IT solutions are those that help customers enhance their business not restrict it. The latest and greatest IT solution may not be the best choice for a business that is unprepared for the changes that can occur when new technology and processes required for utilizing that technology are introduced. We make sure the cure is not worse that the disease, designing an IT strategy that takes into account where a business is and where it can go realistically.

By the same token, there are times that a customer needs to modernize, to take advantage of technology that has become a requirement to successfully conduct business in the market of today and tomorrow. Whether we recommend and implement a "spring cleaning" or step by step approach to modernization, we do so with sensitivity to the challenges that each business faces externally and internally.

Auditing

In many cases, customers come to us without a network diagram, without knowing what they own in terms of software and hardware, what licenses they have, which licenses have expired, what kind of website service they have and when it expires—the list goes on. So we start with an audit. We meet with the customer and assess the scope of the work, the environment, the challenges—a common practice, right?

So what makes us different from ordinary IT consultants? To start, we listen to our customers, noting what makes their business unique, their challenges, budget and deadline. We discover what they want in the way of a solution and what they think they need, which may take us in two different directions, as well as what they want from a consultant and what they don't want. We even listen to their suggestions.  

A PlanetMagpie network audit can provide a complete review of a customer's network topology and operations environment, examining such areas as:

• Network elements - locations, hardware types, environmental issues, security and connectivity
• Documentation – network layout, server and application documentation, support polices, acceptable use policy, configuration listings, wiring layouts, documentation of licensing information and disaster recovery procedures
  
• Network redundancy - single points of failure, recovery plan, backups, hot spares, raid configurations
  
• Support contracts - currency, repair turn-around-time, contact numbers and support contract us policies
  
• Operations - processes, problem resolution methods, network management, staff loading, training needs
  
• Network security – Security analysis of servers, PCs, firewalls, routers, VPNs, building access, password policy and account creation and deletion policies.

Recommendation

After reviewing all the factors, including customer requirements, we recommend the best course of action—the best for our customers.

Implementation

Some IT consultants are more businesspeople than technologists. On the other hand, we are technologists with extensive, practical business experience, committed to making IT an integral part of business processes. And we have the firsthand knowledge to take strategy and turn it into a custom solution of hardware and software, for a dynamic business.