Growth in mobile and social interactions is causing increased demand for transaction processing and data management IT resources. Enterprises cannot handle this growth without fundamentally changing their processes. Managed services providers play an important role in providing solutions that help enterprises manage this expansion in IT infrastructure.  That’s why a Managed Service Provider Summit has been added to IBM’s Edge event in June.

While customers choose managed service providers, customers want to ensure that the services they engage not only provide them with the services they need at the right cost but also that the services meet their business needs. This leads to challenges for MSPs to meet these expectations.  In a previous post, I wrote about the role of MSPs in the new IT landscape. In this post, I will address common issues facing MSPs when crafting strategies:

How do I change my business model to sell managed services?

Major changes to business models are necessary for customers set in a new type of market. In this post we will look at the two most common changes that benefit cloud delivered services.

Sales:
The delivery of early cloud solutions (like hosted email) has led to freemium customer expectations.  Freemium could mean a try-and-buy model (a limited offer of free services before costs kick in) or a limited free service (with added capabilities that incur charges). Either sales model requires current processes to adapt to this change.

Support:
The cost of phone support is prohibitive when some MSP models are considered. Exorbitant costs force providers to pay extra attention when building a solution that requires limited service or when providing email only service in the base subscription cost while at the same time charging an additional fee for a phone support with guaranteed response times.

With whom should I partner?

Cloud services delivered to consumers (e.g. email) do not need to report the backend infrastructure. On the other hand, enterprise customers expect a guarantee that infrastructure meets multiple compliance standards. As a result, MSPs need to evaluate partners whose infrastructure capabilities can be leveraged to differentiate their solution from competition.

What skills are needed to build a managed services organization?

Cloud delivered services require a programmable infrastructure to deliver solutions in a continuous delivery model. Customers have become accustomed to multiple solution upgrades a year without disrupting business. Development skills needed for such solutions are hard to come by. MSPs need to evaluate their own skills, understand needs of the solution they are trying to deliver, and acquire appropriate talent before embarking on a MSP solution journey.

With such challenges, the time is ripe for a summit that exclusively addresses MSP needs. Like many technology providers, IBM is providing a summit for MSPs at their IBM Edge conference in June to help providers manage this tsunami of change. While many events provide static content, IBM plans to address attendee needs through a crowd-sourced session where attendees can share their topics of interest. The responses will be measured, and topics that generate the most interest will be addressed during the summit.

Looking forward to your participation and to hearing your topics of interest at this event.  Feel free to share you opinions here via a comment, tweet me @RobustCloud or take a survey