With so many companies sourcing Managed Service Providers where should you begin to improve your company services?
Today’s post is by Mark Davis; Sr. Vice President and COO at SafeSourcing.
This week we have been looking at the *MSPMentor’s Top 100 (actually it was the top 501) providers and the associated trends in this space among the suppliers and their customers. In particular, we are focusing on the most commonly offered services and what they may mean to your company and its profitability.
NOC Services (80%*) – Virtually everything in your organization connects at some point to your network. Those connections may be limited and have various levels of security but the connection is there nonetheless. In the old days (read that early to mid 1980’s) network administrators would carry pagers with them at all times in case anything happened and the network went down. Today dozens of MSPs are taking the burden of monitoring and troubleshooting problems on your network 24 hours a day. Companies like INOC offer a variety of monitoring solutions to ensure your network is safe and running at all times.
Virtual Servers in the cloud (79%*) – With as many articles that have been written on the cloud and cloud based servers you would think this number would be at 100%. In time, and as companies retire older servers and applications, the move to virtual servers is a foregone conclusion even if they don’t reside in the cloud. The list of MSPs that offer this service is one of the fastest growing in this area as specialized companies like Inhost and powerhouse ISPs like GoDaddy look to continue to offer their customers to services that provide all of the benefits of owning your own servers without the cost, staff or headaches.
Software License Management (77%*) – Similar to patch management, MSPs that provide license management partner with your company to accomplish three specific goals: reducing cost, maintaining legal compliance, and optimizing software use. Working with their customers, MSPs who offer these services ensure that their customers have the licensing that really supports their use of the applications without overpaying for necessary licenses. They can also recommend alternative licensing models to their customers that can decrease the load on their IT staff. Companies like Flexera claim to be able to produce results that can drive 5-30% savings in annual software spend by helping their customers using these techniques.
To learn more about how we can help you find vendors to meet some of these needs, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. Please come back throughout the week for the other top services we will cover in our Week of MSP Service Review.
* Source: MSPmentor 501 Global Report, February 2013, all survey participants.
We look forward to your comments.
