I have been asked something like a gazillion times over the years if TMurgent offered contract App-V Sequencing. Almost every time I say no. Sure, we do a little bit of it each year, but mostly to make sure that the training we give “is real” to what customers need.
Today, this changes.
The reason that I would say no in the past was that there existed other places that you could go to get your applications sequenced out-of-house. The quality of the results might not be so hot sometimes, but they offered a pretty low price. You see, they generally farm out to contractors working in parts of the world where they can get semi-reasonable technical people at a very low cost, so the price of these existing services sounds quite attractive. We have seen this work move from India, to Japan (I never understood that one), to Ireland, Poland, and now to Russia and former Russian territories. Ever driving to keep their costs down, the experience level of the people actually sequencing the apps is minimal.
These sequencing factories work on volume. They expect you to give them a lot of applications, some of which they have already done for someone else. Sure, there may be a few difficult apps, but over-all they build their pricing model on the idea that they can pump out apps quickly and with little effort. So they offer a per-application pricing model.
My experience in talking to customers that have gone with these factories is mixed, but generally unfavorable due to the quality of the product. In those conversations, I hear more satisfaction from European Companies that try to outsource their apps than I do from US based companies. I assume this satisfaction differential is due to a difference in the expectation or the outcome, not who they are outsourcing to (but I don’t really know for sure).
There are some folks out there offering these services with a reasonable record (considering what they charge), but it seems that more often than not, unless you spend a lot of your time and effort to manage the relationship and the quality of what they output to you, the quality of the product is less than desirable.
We have no interest in interfering with this contracting, nor competing with it. Some offer a reasonable service at a great low price. But we clearly hear the need for something different, and today we start answering that need.
Today, TMurgent is announcing that we are expanding beyond offering our internationally acclaimed GridMasterTraining Masters Level Training Program and that we will formally start offering Custom Contract Sequencing.
All sequencing will be performed by associates that have been personally trained by TMurgent’s Tim Mangan, and monitored for quality by TMurgent. We do not seek customers that want to outsource a large list of applications. We do not want your easy apps. We want “the hard stuff”.
Pricing will be by the hour, not the app. If we can’t do it, well first of all probably no one else could either. But if that happens we will share in that failure. Keeping in mind that we only take the hard stuff, we’ll make that a 75/25 split, which I think is fair. It is enough to give us both an incentive to succeed, and keep us in business.
More information on this service will be coming out before the year is over, but we think that this will make an interesting option for companies to supplement their own internal efforts.
We have a web page with a little more information on this service that went up on the main website today at this link. Check it out and let us know what you think!
