IBM's new Managed Vendor Support Services gives clients the opportunity to scale their technical support offerings globally--at their own pace-- via access to IBM's global reach, highly skilled technical professionals, worldwide parts network and logistics expertise.  More than just cost cutting, the new service helps growing companies calibrate the technical support needed by their customers in specific locations around the world and adjust the technical support model required. For example, small and mid-sized companies ranging from retail operations, to electronic game manufacturers to medical device providers can now easily cater to their customers' technical support needs around the globe.

Riverbed Technology, a company specializing in IT performance solutions, approached IBM shortly after going public in 2006 to help with its technical support and customer service offerings in order to remain competitive. The Riverbed® technical support team collaborated with IBM's field service organization to deliver on-site services that minimized system downtime for customers. As a result, Riverbed has improved the performance of their customers' applications and network access to their data, while increasing transmission speeds by 5 to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times.

"By working with IBM, Riverbed is able to optimize solutions for our customers to increase the value of their existing IT infrastructure and the performance of their mission-critical applications," said Scott Downie, senior vice president of worldwide support, Riverbed. "IBM gave us the opportunity to focus on IT innovation, and helped us liberate businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility--all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers."

The MVSS services brings a full technical support capability to clients and their worldwide customers, including call-center support, customer problem resolution and engineering support, onsite services, as well as parts inventory management, stocking and delivery.

"Through the expansion of Managed Vendor Support Services, IBM can help businesses of all sizes meet service level expectations and act as a trusted IT advisor," said Juhi Jotwani, vice president, Multi-Vendor Services, Technical Support Service. "As a result, companies don't have to spend their time coordinating technical support services. And a single focal point may help to hasten recovery from, and potentially prevent the occurrence of outages."

With 30 years of post-sales technical support experience--and thousands of certified professionals who offer services in 209 countries covering 127 languages--IBM can support clients' global coverage needs while helping to mitigate risks and enhance business efficiency. Moreover, by leveraging IBM's highly skilled personnel, businesses can save the time and cost of hiring, training or retaining staff to support expanding business opportunities or new products.