The most dominant factor in the managed service market currently is the price. The customers' judgement is majorly driven by the price at the time of choosing the best service providers for themselves while choosing their services. In fact, many of the consumers go ahead with the service providers with whom they manage to be affordable or cheap compared to the rest of the providers.
The trend of engaging with a partner with cheap packages has negatively affected the current market as some of the consumers make decisions blindly getting attracted to substandard packages. At the same time this is also leading to the increased competition amongst the various service providers who in turn are constantly reducing the cost of adoption of managed services.
It is expected that the consumers will soon break away from the price battle going on and the selection of the service providers would be more focussed on the quality assessing the actual specs, features and benefits rather than pricing
Based on the current trend, the industry has come up with the below mentioned three predictions for 2016:
The popularity of Managed Service Providers will increase
Any SME being smaller in size in terms of their internal staff lacks the time and skills to manage complicated office technology. The technology is changing every moment and coping up to those technological advancements gets on difficult for SMEs. Hence, they opt for outsourcing their IT support services to a Managed Service Provider.
Getting engaged with a Managed Service Provider for contracting the company's IT support services will enable organizations to oversee their day-to-day technology maintenance needs along with recurring problems and will direct to the ways to strengthen company's IT infrastructure. There is an added advantage with the collaboration with MSPs that the company can benefit from their knowledge of industry trends and experience with new technologies.
For any kind of service, companies need to have thorough understanding in that particular domain and this can only be achieved from the number of years of experience in the IT industry. Since the Managed Service Providers have been in this industry since their inception, they have clear understanding, experience and technical knowledge to meet the client's requirements. They can also suggest for the amendments to be made in the company's requirement for smooth functioning. In addition to helping businesses comprehend the complexity of contracted services, MSPs can also assist in making companies aware of the regulatory rules and how to meet those requirements.
Compliance overlay of management is critical
As discussed earlier, the technology is on the constant roll to change. Hence, when it comes to compliance, businesses often face challenges in keeping up with respect to those changes. Undoubtedly there are several aspects to cope up with, so at times it gets pushed to take a back seat.
It's often said that a communication breakdown with the government is to be blamed for the way some of the businesses are struggling in order to efficiently responding to the regulatory changes. To deal with this challenge, some businesses are deliberately creating positions for dedicated regulatory program managers.
Also, companies start thinking that the senior management lacks integrated responses to regulatory reform. Hence, when it is a matter of compliance, it is essential for all business functions to mesh. If only a part of the departments are considered compliant, the entire business functions stand to be still noncompliant.
Companies generally seek for outside help when their businesses struggle in order to manage large amounts of data, stay up-to-date on regulations, retain in-house risk management experts or sync their business's goals with regulations.
Getting engaged with a Managed Service Provider that is familiar with the specific industry can help companies manage effectively the growing amount of data; monitor regulatory changes and help companies develop a cohesive risk management strategy.
Management of private and public clouds will separate.
Due to the commoditization of the colocation market, the public cloud providers are facing challenges within the market.They are working towards the split up of the management of private and public clouds in order to diversify their serviced offerings.
As from a managed services perspective, the current colocation businesses have initiated to certify their engineers for public clouds.As far as their own Data centres are concerned, they are looking at adding their own private managed services within the same. To be precise, the new strategy for them is now to transition from a commoditised colocation provider to a hybrid managed service provider with the usage of various services within their own data centres.
Considering all the above mentioned predictions, 2016 could be a big year for the booming of the managed service providers and their clients business