Business executives repeatedly indicate that the top business goals for enterprises are centered on financial performance metrics that involve:
- Optimizing profits
- Growing revenue
- Driving down costs
A close second to their financial objectives is their focus on ensuring customer satisfaction and market penetration.
What’s getting in the way?
The following complexities must be considered in any plans to achieve financial or customer success.
- Aligning IT strategy with business goals
- Optimizing the utilization and productivity of in-house talent
- Mobility, social media, cloud, and analytics add new complexities
- End users are interacting with enterprises in new ways
- Price comparison shopping in real time
- Customer experience with the brand is almost unlimited (website, Wi-Fi, in-person, social media, blogs, video, television, mobile apps, kiosks, etc.)
- Purchasing a business service on a pay-as-you-go basis
- Demanding instantaneous response
- Expectation of 24/7 assistance during a critical situation
Why are people turning to managed services?
Many organizations are turning to managed services to help transform their businesses during these times of rapid change to ensure competitive advantage. In a recent report, IDC market studies emphasized three fundamental areas for which buyers are looking to utilize managed services to support a shift to hybrid IT:
1. Enabling business agility and adaptation
Managed services is proving to be a strategic means to help enterprises adapt more rapidly to changes in the market by enabling quick access to new capabilities via cloud services, whether platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or software as a service (SaaS). In addition, access to analytics is enabling enterprises to more readily assess current and future needs.
2. Optimizing productivity and performance
While managed services provides access to specific talent, cloud capabilities are viewed as helping improve staff productivity and resource utilization. Cloud capabilities are also utilized to localize enterprise needs by business unit requirements and specific systems of engagement (e.g., sales, customer support, marketing).
3. Ensuring integrated, end-to-end “hybrid” IT service delivery and management
Enterprises also are using managed services as a means of getting support across a hybrid of IT involving traditional delivery models (e.g., more labor oriented) and emerging cloud-based options, which are much more automated. In addition, newer capabilities, such as “broker” options are enabling buyers to gain control and manage across their portfolio of third-party providers of managed services through a single management system.
Other Benefits
A managed service provider (MSP) can monitor and manage your IT assets no matter where they live. An MSP can help you:
- Gain the flexibility to add or remove modular services as needed and pay for the services you use
- Keep your business running and anticipate problems with application visibility
- Securely integrate and manage across heterogeneous platforms via a single pane of glass
- Design, launch and manage innovative new solutions at the speed of business by deploying managed platforms in hours.
- Gain predictable and repeatable outcomes every day, every time with powerful autonomics
- Deploy, provision and manage the entire solution with agility using an extensive library of patterns
It’s all about options.
Many MSP’s offer a wide range of services to suit your needs. Choose the level of services that is best for your organization.
- Monitoring applications, middleware, storage devices, servers and networking
- Cloud design, transformation and onboarding
- Managing multivendor clouds and traditional IT, including platform as a service
- Continuous compliance
- Business continuity solutions
- Security solutions
- Big Data and Analytics solutions
- Converged platforms
- DevOps
- Operating automation using analytics
- Orchestration
- Software-defined environments
- Infrastructure analytics (Infralytics™)
In today’s digital economy, executives report that aligning IT with business imperatives is a challenge and an MSP makes this nearly impossible task possible. Plus, newer technologies are driving fundamental changes in how people interact with organizations. To stay competitive, enterprises are turning to managed services providers.
Schedule a consultation today to learn more about how Flagship can make a difference for your business.
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Managed Services
Flagship Solutions Group can deliver efficiencies across hybrid infrastructures with a broad range of capabilities. We offer clients theflexibility to select the degree of support they want for each layer of infrastructure — from basic monitoring and management to long-term arrangements based on an innovation path designed to replace an aging or inflexible infrastructure with new technology.
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To find the answer, look for 10 key criteria.
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• Achieve integrated hybrid IT service delivery and management
Learn all this and more when you download the IDC white paper “Managed services: Ensuring enterprise transformation to hybrid IT.”
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