by Assen Natchev
As the Covid-19 pandemic is extending to more and more countries, causing expectations for even bigger economic crisis, the companies are preparing for possibly months without their staff in offices. In these hard times new possibilities emerge, giving chance for many companies not only to keep their business, but also to optimize their expenses.
BAAER is one of the companies offering a tested and reliable model, which can answer to these expectations – remote services.
To learn more about them, we had a conference call with its CEO Francois Van Leuven.
Francois has been in IT consultancy since its beginning. He works mostly as an Oracle DBA consultant, (technical) project manager and organizes remote managed services. He has been a consultant for companies like: KBC Bank, Norsk Hydro (Statoil), Pfizer, Yara Chemicals, Umicore, Thomas Cook, Lanxess Chemicals, Christian Mutuality (CM), Partena, Zedra, etc.
Tell us something more about the company and why you want to emphasize on its remote services?
B.A.A.E.R. was created in 2014 in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is a successor of my Belgium IT company and up to now we have over 20 years of IT experience. Still Belgium managed, B.A.A.E.R. has been providing a full range of Database Managed Services and IT Consultancy to our clients and partners from Europe and especially to Benelux region.
For the last several years our remote consultants and managed services enjoy great customer satisfaction. Currently we have remote consultants working from our HQ in Bulgaria and from Croatia, Greece, Serbia and Italy. This allows us to be more competitive, affordable and time flexible (when working from home). We are also able to take bigger loads and spend more time on a customer.
In the current situation with Covid-19, our clients can trust us that there will not be any or just a negligible disruption in their business operations and work processes. We are seasoned professionals, we have the process, the knowledge and ability to do takeovers within days even hours upon a request. Most of all, we are very flexible with clients SLAs and make no compromises with the quality of our services.
Click to join our Free webinar Summit on Thursday, April 30th,May 7th and May14th showing how to manage your database without being physically onsite. There will be MSSQL and Oracle Sessions from master DBAs with over 45 years combined experience. You’ll be able to get a headstart and review what you’re doing from this first in a series of events from BAAER.
If your’e interested in MSSQL , you can join the summit at 11a.m Brussels time and for Oracle at 11:45.
Many companies now move to homeworking. How you are different from them and what makes you confident you can offer something new in the remote services?
In my opinion we just have an edge over other companies because we have been working in a remote position since 2014. It is a long-adopted model in our company. We do not need to motivate our team members or doubt in their productivity when working remotely. For us this is business as usual.
We have an already proven remote model with our clients. For example, we have been using it with companies like Christelijke Mutualiteit (CM) for 9 years.
Also, our people are trained to use remote technologies and they will not lose time to get to grips on different platforms and tools for remote work. We do not have to adopt new routines to work and report remotely. We have already well-established remote processes for monitoring and reporting to our clients.
The most important of our benefits is – we adapt to the security model of the customer! The security for our remote consultants is the same as for the consultant working in offices of our clients. <scroll down for Remote Security and More>
Tell us more about your remote services security?
It has been our security layer plus the client’s one. We have jump servers, VPN, etc. installed to make secure and normal working conditions. Also, we are adapted to what VPN the client uses – like we do now for clients like Zedra (www.zedra.com) and Partena (www.partena-professional.be). Our New York customer in healthcare Medi-Ehr (www.medi-ehr.com) has other security requirements we need to follow. By using our fully remote IT services, our clients can be sure that our infrastructure is entirely protected, our communications are fully encrypted, and the security of information is at the highest level!
Who do you think can benefit of your remote expertise?
My message should make sense and be of assistance, first for the recruitment companies in Benelux. Now they need to find more specialists for their clients. Having us as partner, they can continue adding value to them as we also provide full options for remote services.
Other target group are the CEOs, who need help for their companies. They can use this hard period to check their infrastructures, do any migrations if necessary, move to another provider, do necessary upgrades as for example Window 7 Professional and Oracle 12 are already out of support, etc. In few words – now is the perfect time to reduce operational costs by doing optimization of their IT infrastructures and business processes.
We can also be of help for the small companies, which for the moment cannot afford to hire full time onsite consultants. For them we can provide remote ones per hour.
Different companies can have different needs and financial resources for remote services. How you address this?
In the standard way, by offering flexible methods for recruitment and payment. As for the moment onsite consulting is not possible, our consultants can work fully remote, either as a single specialist or a whole dedicated team.
When the businesses need help, they can hire out remote consultant or team and pay per hour.
We also continue to offer our packages of Managed services with fixed monthly fee support. In this case for any extra spent hour by a consultant, we charge additionally.
Do you want to say something else in conclusion?
In this period of uncertainty and slowing down economy, it is very important to keep efficiency, with less resources and money, so to achieve the same or better results. This means stopping unreasonable costs, but also increasing efficiency by optimizing legacy systems, improving affected processes and making security easier.
Our remote solutions can save money to companies and increase their efficiency. This is not new, but tested, established and reliable model and you can count on this.
As every crisis this one will also pass, and it depends on us how we get out of it. Do not be discouraged and allow me to paraphrase my moto: “The crisis isn’t the end, it’s part of the journey. Quitting is the end!”
We are hosting a Free webinar Summit on Thursdays April 30th,May 7th and May14th showing how to manage your database without being physically onsite. There will be MS SQL and Oracle Sessions from master DBAs with over 45 years combined experience. You’ll be able to get a head-start and review what you’re doing from this first in a series of events from BAAER.
If your’e interested in MS SQL Server , you can join the summit at 11 a.m Brussels/CET on Thursday April 30th or for Oracle at 11:45 a.m Brussels/CET
