Have the quote checked before you sign it
We look at what you already have, what the quote covers and what you will need in three years. With no ties to any manufacturer.
Book an intro callThe quote has been sitting on the desk for two weeks. New servers, licences to go with them, and a three-year maintenance contract on top. Who inside the company is supposed to judge whether those machines are too big, too small or simply unnecessary? Not the accountant. Whoever wrote the quote is not a neutral judge of it either, and the colleague who knows his way around technology actually looks after production. So a decision gets made, because at some point one has to be.
Ruknova reads quotes like that against the facts. First we look at what is actually running at your site: the age of the equipment, how heavily it is used, which licences are held, how long the contracts still run. Then we tell you which line item in the quote you need and which one you can strike. Khodor Kassem ran the entire IT of a mid-sized company as its sole administrator and worked in large corporate environments before that. He knows how quotes like these are costed, from both sides.
What is included.
Checking the quote line by line
We take the quote apart item by item and hold it against what your environment actually carries today. Oversized line items and licences you are paying for twice are flagged in writing.
Stocktake on site
Servers, switches, firewall, backup targets, licence agreements, notice periods: we record what is there and note how old each device is and when each contract expires. You get the result as a list, not as a presentation.
Planning across several years
Equipment age and contract terms turn into a timeline: what is due this year, what is due next year, what can still wait. You can see which quarter brings which cost, and you can budget for it.
Changing service provider
When you move to a new provider, we accompany the handover: collecting credentials, requesting documentation, terminating contracts within the notice period, closing the previous provider's remote access. We will also tell you when a change brings you no advantage as far as we can see.
No sales interest in the background
We have no hardware sales targets to hit and we take no commission on the products we recommend. Whether the answer turns out to be Fortinet, Microsoft or the device already sitting in your rack depends on what you need and on nothing else.
The documents stay with you
The assessment, the inventory list and the timeline go to you as files, not into a customer portal that we control. If you implement the plan with a different provider, that provider has everything needed to do it.
How we work.
A conversation about what prompted it
It starts with the question of what is on the table right now: a quote, a contract running out, a move to new premises. After that you know how deep we need to look and whether the effort is worth it for your question at all.
Going through the systems
We go through systems, contracts and licences, either on site or in a remote session, and we talk to the people who work with them every day. There is a lot of reading in this phase and we change nothing.
Assessment and recommendation
You get an assessment written in sentences that work without an IT dictionary: what you can keep, what needs replacing, which line item in the quote you should strike. The reasoning comes with it, so you can justify the decision to your owners.
Implementation as you choose
You can award the implementation to us, to your existing provider or to nobody at all. When the next decision comes round a year later, we pull out the timeline and carry it forward instead of starting from scratch.
Common questions.
I have a quote in front of me and have to reply next week. Can you manage that?
For a single quote, usually yes. We need the quote itself, a list of the servers and workstations you have, and about an hour with whoever knows the systems. A fuller stocktake takes longer, because the contract paperwork has to be gathered together and the answers to it often sit with several different people.
I pay for advice that ends up telling me to invest even more. What do I get out of that?
The result often goes in the other direction. Stocktakes turn up licences for people who left the company long ago, maintenance contracts for equipment sitting unused in the cellar, and quotes costed for twice the number of users. If the quote does fit, we say that too, and you sign without the feeling that you have overlooked something.
You are an IT service provider yourselves. How independent is your second opinion then?
It is a fair objection, which is why we say up front whether we would even be candidates for the implementation. If it is a server room we would like to look after afterwards, we have an interest of our own, and that belongs on the table before you read our assessment. You can also commission the advice explicitly without any implementation. The report reads the same either way.
Our current provider will hear about this. Does that not put us in an awkward position?
They hear about it only if you want them to. For the review we need access to documents and systems, and you can give us that yourself. We speak to your current provider only when you expressly ask us to. In many cases everything stays as it was, and only the sizing of the quote changes.
We are not based in Schwerin. Do you actually have to come to us for the stocktake?
For most of it, no. Contracts, licence lists, configurations and backup reports can be reviewed remotely, and the conversations with your people work well over video. We travel to site when cabling, the server room or wireless coverage needs assessing, because none of that shows up on a screenshot. We work throughout Germany, and being based in Schwerin does not get in the way of that.
Put the quote in front of us
Send us the quote and a rough list of your systems. We go through the items, flag what is missing and what has been costed too generously, and tell you what to query with the supplier.
Book an intro call