Good morning to you all, and thanks to GFI MAX for giving me this opportunity to say a few words to this great crowd.

As you have noticed, I am reading my speech, and you might be wondering why…

The real reason is that I don´t speak English very well, so I made a wise decision to just read my speech. However, knowing myself, I know I will make a couple of mistakes… So, I apologize in advance.

My name is Cristiano, I´m originally from Brazil, I have a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering, specializing in computer science. I am also the owner and director of my own business, CLS and we have been providing IT services and products for many years. We are also partners with Microsoft, Comptia and many other manufacturers.

In general we do the same as most of you here: we fix computers, printers and UPSs. We give preventive and corrective assistance in Servers and IT infrastructure to many companies in and around the city of Vitória in the State of Espirito Santo.Up to the end of 2013 we used to work without any specific tools or integrated monitoring system. It was very difficult to predict problems. We basically solved problems as they appeared.

Most issues were then always considered an emergency by our customers and no matter what we did, we could never get them to be satisfied with our services. Even if we solved all their system’s problems, they were still not happy. Why? Because what they really wanted was for us to solve the problem before it happened.It was very difficult to provide remote assistance, because each customer had a different remote tool, mostly not licensed, and piracy ruled. Besides they don’t know how to use a remote access tool. We used to spend more time trying to connect to our clients’ devices, than solving the customers’ problem itself.

Another problem was, if we had too many customers, we needed more people to get the job done. More people meant more expenses. It also meant more effort to contrôl those extra people.Companies of our size in Brazil hardly use SLAs or ticket tracking. Some try to use open source tools but there is no integration, and the effort for setup and maintenance discourages many of them.

In December 2013, we met GFI MAX at a Conference in Sao Paulo. When I asked if MAX was a remote access tool, the answer was yes. Then I asked if MAX monitored computers and servers, the answer was also yes. Does it have inventóry? Yes. Antivirus? Yes. GFI MAX had everything I asked for and needed. I was fascinated and immediately started a trial. After two months, all of our client’s devices had the agents installed.

Our strategy was first to install and demonstrate the bénêfits of the new tool, without increasing the price. We spent about six months fixing problems, reporting to clients, and getting their trust by shôwing the quality of our service. Then we started implementing MAV and MOB, now charging a little more and increasing our rêvenue. Since then, all new contracts and renewals of old ones are executed with higher prices.

I realized that it was what the market needed and wanted. A company acting more preventívely, with integration of tools, a ticket system and an efficient SLA.The cost of MAV, MOB and Web Protection are ínteresting for companies who cannot invest a high sum of money in the most known solutions in Brazil. Which is preçáisely the area of our expertíse.Our satisfaction rate reached a very high level. My team has reduced in size. We serve more customers with fewer employees.

We learned that the MSP should have at least three things to work efficiently:

1) Network Operations Center - My team get an overview on a large screen in my office. It continually refreshes when any new problem arises, allowing us to fix it quickly, before users suffer downtime.

2) Remote Monitoring with MAX RemoteManagement - This tool allowed my IT team to stay ahead when it comes to availability, performance and users’ experience problems. Now, small issues are solved before they become worse.

3) Tickets and SLA with MAX ServiceDesk is a very efficient and easy to configure helpdesk tool. This tool increased our productivity and support processes.

Now we are entering a new stage. Providing backup, antivirus and web protection to our customers. We also want to get large companies as our customers outside of our city, and this is being made possible with MAX. Thank you all for listening. Once again, thank you very much!