A survey from IT consultancy Teneo Group shows 60 percent of corporate IT managers IT budgets are still frozen. They've been frozen in fact, since the height of the recession in 2008, the survey found.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that 20 percent of those surveyed are more optimistic these days.
Wait. More bad news.
An additional 20 percent stated that their budgets were currently being reduced.
Okay enough bad news. Here's something for MSPs to smile about if the survey is any indication for potential upticks in business: The report said that IT managers, in an attempt to overcome budget shortfalls, reduce capital expenditure and total cost of IT process ownership, 52 percent of IT heads surveyed are planning to increase their use of selected managed services.
Breaking it down on a more granular level, 37 percent pegged outsourcing network infrastructure management as a priority, with 20 percent looking to use managed WAN administration services. Additionally, 17 percent are looking to increase the use of SaaS or cloud computing offerings.
This survey in particular means that as slow as most recovery is -- IT spending certainly isn't immune to this downturn -- all of the optimism is pointing toward managed services.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on July 28, 20100 comments
One of the opportunities that managed services provides is the ability of IT shops be innovative in a client stack, as well as create conduit-proprietary software or hardware configurations that complement partner products.
A good example of such an undertaking, especially for more of the entrepreneurial and tech-savvy minded MSPs, is middleware. By finding a middlware niche, an MSP can provide a degree of interoperability that supports SMB legacy systems, vendor products and other third-party partners.
One IT shop called inhouseIT, created an anti-spam system that was so effective with their product offerings that they spun the product off to a sister company called Spam Soap. In this case, not only has whole new business been derived from a middleware pet project to create more efficiency, but peer MSPs can also leverage the service for their clients.
Too often, MSPs are strictly concerned with serving the technology needs of SMB clients who are most often in verticals, where technology isn't the core business. In inhouseIT's case and in the case of Network Depot, which created Virtual Administrator, other MSPs can be the customers or strategic partners, an idea that sells itself.
It's kind of like cutting in the middle man – or middleware – instead of cutting him out.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on July 27, 20100 comments