Managed Print Services (MPS) evolving to Managed IT Services (MITS) in Education

Hi Adrian, can you tell us how Craven College and Apogee came to work together to provide a Managed IT Services (MITS) solution?

So, Apogee won a contract for our Managed IT Services (MITS) via the CPC framework. They're basically a pre-existing client partner through their Managed Print Service (MPS) offering. Craven College was Apogee's client for about 18 months on the Manage Print side of things before we took the step to laptop devices and PC devices. It started with an initial conversation between myself and Tom (Proudfoot), literally as we were rolling out the Manage Print devices. I literally asked him, do you also do laptop and PC devices? Literally started the meetings with this. We must have had a dozen meetings about specifying the laptops, what kind of offering Apogee can do. That's where it started, with that relationship.

Can you tell us perhaps the main concern Craven College faced in their IT estate that they hoped to address through Apogee’s Managed IT Service (MITS)?

Yeah. So I started in 2019 I came from a retail background and there was no plan for investment. There was no refresh cycle for devices. So a lot of the machines, they were twelve years old, but some old Zoo Storm machines. So they really started to struggle with Corvette and remote teaching. They were really struggling with video calling on Microsoft teams. So we had to do something.

Adrian, could you explain how in your role, alongside Apogee that you decided on what devices to implement within the Managed IT Services (MITS) roll-out?

   So, I was looking for best of breed, something reliable, something secure. It really needed to guarantee the performance over the duration of the contract. So, we looked at HP just from knowledge in the sector. We have other HP equipment, alongside print devices. We also had previously got three mac suites again, ageing they were late 2012. So similar issues, performance impacting students and teaching and learning. So, we needed to upgrade the Mac’s as well, which Apogee could supply.

Adrian, as the IT manager of Craving College, how has Managed It Services (MITS) facilitated your job and made it easier?

Yeah. So we literally couldn't have done the project without Apogee, we've only got a small team. It's probably the same across all the education sector. We've got a small IT Department. So Apogee came and installed all the devices. They did a lot of the leg work, removing the packaging. This all takes a lot of time. So taking all that pressure away from my team, it's been excellent. I think managed services in education, it's difficult to have the bigger teams in education and the specialist skills. So manage services, it's only going to grow within education. It makes sense to outsource some of those skills to manage services.

Can you tell us how do you see the IT sector, specifically the IT Sector across schools, colleges and universities within the education sector evolving over the next number of years?

So I see it changing more to cloud based systems and specifically in education, a lot more focus on edtech in the classrooms, getting the most out of the technology. We've only started scratching the surface with some of the devices. We're trying to embed the use of the Microsoft product as well. So some of the Apogee and the HP products, helping us with the stylus and touch screens and getting the casting technology with the screen beam, getting the students to engage and participate in the learning. So I can see a big shift towards that. Students, yes. So the feedback from students has been great. It actually shifted the problem from so we had a lot of performance issues on the old equipment and the performance of the new machines have been so good, we've had to stop students gaming. Yeah, they're really good. Performance of machines, but yeah, the feedback has been good. They're far superior than what we had.

Within the teaching staff, alongside IT support staff, have you seen a change in how they feel about the deployment of Managed IT Services (MITS)?

Yeah. So mainly for the teachers I found ‘shock’, shock that they were getting such good equipment. I don't think they've been used to getting nice new capable equipment in the past. So, yeah, pure, mainly shock. And they're all really appreciative of the devices. For IT support staff we were spending a lot of time supporting some of the old equipment, basically performance issues, primarily just not up to scratch and not up to being able to cope with teaching and learning. Remote technology, video calling. That is now gone.