What is ASPIRE Managed Services

What is ASPIRE?  

It is a differentiated value-led approach to Managed Services which aims to make a real difference to your business. The ASPIRE framework allows for a relentless focus on outcomes during your digital transformation journey to drive change, innovation and real value in every project.  

The six letters each represent a key area in our managed service offering. These areas, also known as pillars, were expertly selected to reflect the emerging trends and drivers in the managed service market, to ensure a future-proofed service for our customers.  With each of the pillars delivered together, the ASPIRE  model enables our customers to achieve better results and real business benefits from their IT estates.    

What does ASPIRE stand for?  

Read on to discover everything you need to know about each letter in A S P I R E and how it can make a big difference to your business.  

A is for Automating Efficiency   

The A in ASPIRE stands for automating efficiency. This reflects our commitment to using world-class automation processes and tooling as part of Version 1’s managed services.

Our automation strategy is built around the concept of automate first, self-service next, and manual intervention last. Really what that means is that we look for every opportunity to automate repetitive error-prone or highly intensive tasks. Most importantly, it means we’re not advocating automation for automation’s sake but only where it makes good sense for our customers to do so. 

Separately we leverage the investment and capabilities our world-class tooling and platforms provide to allow our customers to complete tasks themselves without the need for extensive manual Version 1 input. 

Essentially, we’re trying to remove manual intervention as much as possible from the day-to-day application support maintenance activities, reserving that effort for higher-value work where our consultants can use their expertise to make a real difference to our customer’s businesses.  

Streamlining user experiences 

The S in ASPIRE, which stands for streamlining user experiences, is concerned with putting users back at the heart of what we do in managed services. This is something that will help our customers stay ahead in terms of modern user expectations. It also means designing systems with user experience in mind from the get-go. This is done by using innovative technology such as RPA and AI Ops to increase response times and provide intelligent insight and operational data activities that are likely to improve user experience levels. 

User experience is considered such an important facet of managed services today we made the important decision to tie it into our value level agreement (VLA) approach. It is certainly something we’ll be looking at going forward with our ASPIRE managed service customers.  

Protect and Secure  

The P in ASPIRE stands for protect and secure. We’ve all seen the ransomware attacks on organisations such as the HSE in Ireland and how that crippled the national organisation both operationally and financially. Now more than ever as technology and innovation advances at pace, we need to ensure that security also keeps pace for our customers.    

Version 1 is an ITIL aligned, externally accredited ISO organization. We undergo regular vigorous audits for world-class information security certifications. We invest heavily in maintaining our strong position as a leading managed service provider to ensure a strong, robust service offering and most importantly to offer peace of mind to our customers.

With over 20 years’ experience in delivering managed services, we continue to adapt to the many industry and sector-specific standards, frameworks and certifications required to service our diverse customer base. We proactively design security into system architecture as well as understand and leverage all of the capabilities our platform and tuning provide in order to keep our customer’s systems and data secure.  

Innovative Technologies

The I in ASPIRE reflects the seismic shift towards the use of innovative technologies in the support, enhancement, and transformation of our customer systems. Managed service providers have long since assisted organizations in keeping their enterprise software running smoothly, securely, reliably and cost-effectively.   

Whilst these principles remain important in today’s environment of revolutionary technological change and industry disruption, they are no longer sufficient.  

ASPIRE managed services uses emerging technologies to deliver more to our customers and what does that mean? It means that we utilize innovations such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation and much more to relieve real pain points. We don’t just use innovation for innovation’s sake, we use it to benefit our customers. 

Realising meaningful KPI’s

The R in ASPIRE stands for realising meaningful KPIs.    

It is hopefully clear from what we’ve explained so far on the other ASPIRE pillars that Version 1 relentlessly focuses on identifying, agreeing, and achieving meaningful KPIs for our customers.   

From increasing efficiency through streamlined UX and automation to proactively reducing patching time and effort as a managed service improvement, Version 1 will leverage the latest and greatest in technology to accomplish these business objectives for our customers. 

By partnering with a managed service provider with the experience, expertise, and the results to prove it, worries about support and maintenance will be a thing of the past. We’ll help our customers focus on what matters – their bigger picture objectives and strategic initiatives.   

Evolve continuously

The E in ASPIRE stands for evolve continuously.   

This pillar reflects the fact that systems must continually adapt, or they risk becoming progressively less valuable to our customers. So, our job as a managed service provider is to ensure that we’re always seeking to enhance and optimise our customer’s estates so that they continue to deliver value back to the customer. 

Secondly, it also speaks towards the ASPIRE ethos directly, which is that ASPIRE managed services is a continuously evolving offering which will adapt and change as technology advances and customer and end-user requirements evolve. 

Version 1 and our customers operate in a constantly changing and demanding environment, and we want our customers to know that their ASPIRE managed services will evolve with their unique needs.  

One customer which has benefitted from our ASPIRE Managed Services is Goodbody, a leading financial services firm who are a full-service, investment-led business that offers wealth management, asset management and investment banking services. Version 1 provided a data migration of on-premises to AWS Oracle RDS solution which involved utilising a variety of AWS functionality and Oracle tools to provide a controlled and seamless migration with minimal operational risk. This resulted in the successful migration of Goodbody databases to AWS RDS. Find out here how they utilised ASPIRE and how Version 1 helped them to progress into the next phase of their managed infrastructure.

For more information on our Managed Services, you can also check out our latest webinar: Move Beyond the Status Quo – Optimise Your Oracle Cloud Support. Where specialists from Version 1 examine various topics including our Aspire Managed Services framework, which has been optimised internally to overcome common challenges faced by our customers.

Contact us today with any other questions.