By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Many property managers are paying way too much for their IT networks and services – including Wi-Fi – and many are not even aware of it. Some are held in an iron grip by integrator or VAR agreements that can be both expensive, restrictive, and inefficient. NETGEAR Business reseller Rob Squires of GotConsultants says self-service network management and low license fees are the efficient alternatives – and a way forward.
Many property management companies across the US are locked in the grip of restrictive and expensive IT service agreements that offer little value and keep property and guest operations sluggish at best. Many are not even aware how much they pay for services they could easily manage themselves or for unnecessary and extravagant license fees for equipment, says Rob Squires of GotConsultants. Rob Squires has been a NETGEAR Business reseller for more than 20 years.
“Overcharging and getting locked in to agreements by VARS and integrators is a very common problem that we see all the time. Property mangement companies – for example – are often badly advised by their VARs and need help to find a better way of operating including better solutions that they can operate themselves, at least at the basic level,” Rob Squires says.
Rob Squires says he has been advising one property management client in the San Francisco Bay area to cut cost and improve operations by swapping out a large enterprise IT vendor for a NETGEAR Business solution. “We wound up doing an audit for this company and found out they were paying something around ten times too much. They had also become completely dependent on VAR support for even the simplest tasks, like changing Wi-Fi passwords or similar,” he says.
The solution was a rip-and-replace installation of NETGEAR WAX610 Wi-Fi 6 APs and – importantly – introducing NETGEAR’s ‘Insight’ Cloud-management platform, which is available for a reasonable fee. The result is that the client is now empowered to do many the basic tasks themselves even though they are not IT professionals, says Rob Squires. “Many tasks on Insight are so intuitive that you really have to try very hard to get them wrong. This has given the property management company so much more freedom and operational efficiency,” he says.
NETGEAR Business’ Insight platform – which offers multi-tenancy unified management of the wired and wireless network – comes in Premium and Pro versions with the Premium version priced at less than one US dollar per month per AP. Rob Squires says he’s never been concerned about the reliability of NETGEAR equipment. “Everything just works. We’ve even had 8-year old NETGEAR APs that are still going strong but had to be replaced for other reasons,” he says. NETGEAR offers a huge selection of switches, Wi-Fi APs, and Wi-Fi mesh – all manageable from the Insight platform.
Rob Squires says that his company – GotConsultants – have never had to advertise their services nor needed as much as a website to represent themselves. “We always get loads of work and it always comes by word-of-mouth. We’re very careful in making sure we deliver value at the right price while at the same time making sure our clients also can take care of their own needs. That’s our secret to success. And NETGEAR continues to be a great partner for us,” he says.
/Claus.
