Just how well do managed services live up to their promise – a frank look at the typical IT challenges faced by small to medium companies.

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Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs in this context are defined as 5-500 employees) are turning to managed service providers to help them monitor, manage, and maintain their increasingly important Information and Communication Technology (ICT) environments. By offloading routine yet vital IT infrastructure duties, these businesses hope to reduce IT operational costs and deliver higher service levels to the business.

Just as importantly, they need to free up IT and business personnel to focus on more strategic business issues and less on day-to-day IT infrastructure management. But how well do managed services live up to the promise?

Blue Saffron has conducted a survey of some of its current Managed Services customers to gain a more detailed and quantifiable view of the time, cost, and productivity benefits achieved by the adoption of managed services . The report provides some insight into typical commercial and ICT demands faced by businesses and the prime decision criteria applied during the procurement of managed services.

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Prior to deploying Managed Services SME respondents are typically:

• Challenged to deploy new applications that address their business needs. c.75% of respondents said their toughest IT challenge was to “implement new solutions that the business requires” to achieve business goals.
• Lacking the internal resources to provide the service levels and IT expertise that their businesses demand. In fact, c45% of respondents indicate that having a managed service provider that can manage their “complete IT infrastructure” is very important to them.
• Wanting to move internal IT staff to more strategic projects-not to reduce IT headcount. Only 30% turn to managed services to “reduce internal IT staff:’ In contrast, c.70 % of respondents view the ability to “free up internal IT staff to focus on core business instead of break/fix activities” as an important driver for managed services.
• Expressing concern about managed services pricing. 43% indicate that their perception that managed services was “too expensive for my budget” was a very important concern. Survey findings reveal that implementing Blue Saffron Managed Services has helped respondents reap significant benefits that aid in addressing these challenges, including:
  • Realizing significant reductions in downtime. On average, annual downtime decreased by more than 50% after deploying the service. This translates into 2.5%-4.9% in revenue gains and decreased loss of revenues from inability to perform critical tasks due to a system outage.
    Helping companies focus and improve core business initiatives. Companies have reduced internal IT staff costs for IT infrastructure management by more than 50%. As a result, 89% of respondents say the service is “freeing up time so that they concentrate resources on more strategic business requirements:’
  • An overwhelming 92% of customers are achieving “better service” than with prior IT infrastructure management methods. 89% say the service is providing “improved service levels for key business applications:’ By reducing downtime and the resulting inability to perform mission critical tasks, revenue loss from IT outages decreased by 1.8%-3.5%.
  • On average, SME respondents are spending only .2% to .6% of their annual revenues on Managed Services. Actual managed service costs are very affordable, even for the smallest of companies.

Further Information

• IT for Productivity: managed services from Blue Saffron
• Managed Infrastructure services
• Professional IT Service Desk solutions
• Professional management of Microsoft services
• Contact us