Progent – Microsoft and Cisco Certified Consultants

I was a full time Progent employee for 2 years. I still consult with them now. I’m very surprised to read negative reviews about a company that I know first hand does a great job.
The review by Linda B below is not truthful. Let me tell you why. If she were charged $ 900 for 4 hrs of work, that would mean the bill rate for the engineer was $ 225 per hour. None of Progents engineers, even the most highly certified ones bill at this rate. Its just a fact.
Progent does bill by the minute. Why, so that their customers are not billed for one minute longer that the actual time an engineer spends resolving their problem. There is no padding, or flate rate. This is in favor of the client.
Progent is comprised of highly skilled certified professionals. We are people with demonstrated ability to solve the most complex IT issues as well as helping clients to improve, maintain and grow their existing infrastructure. We do desktop support as well, so no one is left out. Whether you are expanding your domain, need help programming your Cisco firewall or just want to migrate to a new computer, Progent does a great job at all of this.
I have hundreds of satisfied clients and working at Progent was rewarding. Most of my clients were all regulars. Small and medium business’ with regular IT needs. I had a few smaller enterprise customers as well who used Progent to outsource their IT services. We never had problems meeting our customers needs, and happy customers is our first priority.

I’ve used the services of Progent consultants several times over the years where I’ve had a Cisco or Windows project that I’d rather not learn how to do myself, or really need to get it right the first time, or just can’t figure something out in the moment. They’ve always done a good job for me at a reasonable cost.

We have had several issues with our Site to Site VPN and everytime Progent and Prem (our assigned Cisco Certified Tech) have been able to resolve the issue in a matter of hours regardless of the time. We worked with local IT companies in the past, but were never able to achieve the up time that we have been able to since using Progent for our troubleshooting.
They have been a pleasure to work with and we look forward to a long business relationship with Progent. We would highly recommend them for your IT and Cisco needs.

I was hesitant to use Progent because of the poor reviews. However, after scouring the interwebs and Unilocal for Cisco Certified technicians, I didn’t have any other choice.
I even told the sales associate that I was nervous to use them, but he urged me to give them a try. I was glad I did.
They were great. They solved our problem in 40 minutes and it was worth every penny. If you need Cisco router work done, I can and wil gladly vouch for them.

What a ripoff. Don’t give them your credit card number! If you do, according to the banks, you have authorized them to charge as much as they want for nothing. They don’t guarantee anything and they charge by the minute.
I asked Progent to do a simple network of my 2 home office PCs and laptop because I had moved and didn’t have a local PC support person. They sent someone who they later admitted was not a network specialist, who bumbled around for 4 hours and still did not get them networked. They charged me almost $ 900 and refused to reduce it! They connected me with a 2^nd technician later who seemed to know more and he got it temporarily working, but it didn’t stick for some reason and they don’t give any guarantees. I had to pay more to hire a local person with some integrity to get the connectivity working and find an actual solution.

I seriously wish I had a voice recorder when I was on the phone with the IT consultant that was working on my project so I could upload that here. I have a small business that was in need of some Linux help and found them on a Google search. The advice on the phone was on thing, then a completely different action was done. Long story short, you will pay through the nose for their service. Their customer service team will never admit that some of the work performed was not asked for, and they will always claim their work is beneficial.
They also like to charge by the minute, so much that if an Engineer decides he doesn’t like your Excel spreadsheet he will go and make his own (without asking) and then charge you 30 minutes of work.
All their consultants are outsourced so it is easy to see where the motivation is, bill by the minute, don’t worry about actually getting the project done well or within budget. Consultant gets paid 50% of costs etc.
In the end you will be much better off using someone like OnTimeTech. Billing is by the hour and if you aren’t totally satisfied with the work done they’ll work with you to ensure it gets fixed right at their costs. After all, this is a service business and Progent’s customer service is a F-​. Stay away.