Managed service offerings are increasing every day across all spectrums and specialties in from infrastructure, to databases, applications and Cloud.
But with change comes hesitation as some companies querying the overall business benefits versus cost and keeping in-house.
Increasingly however, procurement and IT business units are seeing managed services as an ease-of-use model to ensure their environments are constantly evolving, allowing increased productivity and revenue.
IntegrationWorks COO Bret Duffield works with his team of devOps, architects and integration specialists to deliver integration specific managed services to clients and says the solution is a warranted "money-maker and time-saver."
“The current IT environment is struggling with digital transformation; what used to be a solution that had a long life-span is quickly outdated with the speed of innovative customer-oriented technologies coming to market,” Duffield comments, “keeping abreast of change, training your team and integrating with your existing environment a constant costly chase.”
A comprehensive managed service offering can ensure that the business has access to specialist technologist experts who are focused on enhancing a specific area of the IT environment.
“Having a team of outsourced experts at your disposal, whether it be in integration, security, infrastructure or the likes, means that you don’t fall short of industry or technical knowledge when undergoing dramatic system change,” he adds.
According to Duffield, the ability to save money while making money increases too.
“A standard managed service has a flat subscription billing rate, so you can predict the spend monthly which never gets blown out by change requests or varying project costs. And, as your team is now able to focus on their central tasks, productivity increases and revenue capability builds.”
Another indirect benefit is the managed service providers ensuring they employ best practice, expertise in their field, industry leading standards and vendor discounts to stay competitive.
“As a managed service provider in integration, we’re always trying to keep ahead of our competitors by offering the best architectural or devOps practice, adding in value with discount licensing or giving strategy consulting to ensure we’re competitive,” Duffield explains.
"We need to make sure that our service is solving our client’s integration problems, leading them through change and providing more value than the overall cost.”
As digital and IT solutions become vital to business operations and growth, the risks of down-time, system failure and archaic platforms increase.
To counteract those risks, Duffield suggests that a managed service provider may just be the way for the enterprise environment to future-proof their environment while using it as a "nifty way" to increase the number on the bottom line.
