ENGLEWOOD, CO -- (Marketwire) -- 12/04/12 -- In response to expanding customer demand for increasingly complex, hybrid IT infrastructure, Latisys, a leading national provider of outsourced IT delivered on a high-density, high-security platform, today announced the Latisys Unified Service Desk.

This new centralized approach is a critical underpin for Latisys' suite of IT infrastructure solutions -- from colocation to the cloud -- delivered over a high density enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that encompasses eight data centers across the United States. After six months of production benchmarking, Latisys' new Unified Service Desk is delivering a high satisfaction overall customer experience due to greater efficiency, quicker response times, greater scale and repeatability.

Based on ITIL best practices and processes, and featuring 24x7x365 fully redundant coverage, Latisys' Unified Service Desk takes a resolution-driven approach to expedite triage and troubleshooting for even the most complex technical issues. Designed to easily engage resources across all Latisys disciplines, the Service Desk emphasizes clear, consistent, proactive customer communication based on committed times and follow-through. It features experienced single points of contact that are integrated deeply into Latisys' business and are empowered to take active ownership of incidents. These technically trained and certified personnel own everything from start to resolution and can escalate as needed.

Customers benefit from higher visibility into the support process and more efficient, effective, faster time to resolution. After six months of production, incident close rate at the first point of contact is averaging 90%.

Intelishift Technologies, headquartered in Northern Virginia, uses Latisys' Ashburn IaaS platform to provide a complete line of outsourced IT management and telecommunications infrastructure services to its clients. These include technology firms, Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and large government agencies. In addition to leveraging Latisys' outsourced IaaS platform, Intelishift depends on Latisys' trained customer care team to provide round-the-clock support to resolve any issues and ensure optimal customer experience.

NOC Personnel Return to Core Competencies
Key to Latisys' success has been a shift in responsibility from the Network Operations Center (NOC) to the Unified Service Desk. This enables NOC technicians at each site to focus solely on the needs of hosting customers. NOC personnel were previously responsible for troubleshooting service requests -- and today their focus is primarily on core data center management: data center facility monitoring, security, remote hands and on-site customer support. This shift is contributing to average hold times under 15 seconds and service levels at 98%.

At the same time, trained service desk personnel have moved issue resolution closer to the front lines of support -- taking all inbound customer calls, quarterbacking ticket and incident management, security authentication steps, directly managing issue response and resolution and taking responsibility for SLA adherence -- all with a goal of increasing first call closure rate while preventing any recurrence. These trained personnel maintain key industry certifications, accreditations and training programs such as Windows, Linux, ITIL, VMware, network certifications and more.

In addition, Latisys' commitment to providing highly flexible IT solutions tailored to customer needs mandates extremely disciplined technical QA processes for quickly identifying potential configuration issues, reducing failure rates and ensuring the accuracy, quality and timeliness of all provisioned solutions.

"Most service providers typically take an escalation-driven approach to customer service. They work off of checklists that, while organized, are not efficient," said Carolyn Merritt, VP of Customer Care. "Latisys' resolution-driven approach involves both trained professionals empowered to analyze each situation -- asking the right questions, conducting an early assessment, and quickly tasking the team with the right expertise backing up our commitment to 'one call does it all.' It also requires additional emphasis on customer communication to ensure they are frequently updated and apprised of status while also involved in troubleshooting steps as needed."

Earlier this year, Latisys announced that it is adding 72,000 square feet of highly secure, high density, carrier grade IT infrastructure space along with significant power upgrades. After opening DEN2 -- Latisys' newest state-of-the-art data center in Denver -- and DC5 -- a 22,000 square foot expansion in Ashburn, Latisys' total data center platform exceeds 343,000 square feet across seven data centers in four major markets.

About Latisys
Latisys is a leading national provider of colocation, managed hosting, managed services, disaster recovery and private cloud solutions to medium-sized businesses, enterprise customers and government agencies. With a heritage of serving business customers since 1994, and multiple high-density data centers across the United States, Latisys offers a scalable outsourced IT infrastructure platform that provides customers with what they need, when they need it. As a client-centric company -- with state of the art data centers in Ashburn, Virginia, Chicago, Denver and Irvine, California -- Latisys is quickly becoming the IaaS platform of choice for companies that demand more from their IT infrastructure partner. All while optimizing clients' return on investment. All while 'delivering more_'. Call 1-866-956-9594, visit www.latisys.com or follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/Latisys for additional information.

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