The connected economy and digital transformation have put applications, devices, and networks front and center at many businesses. That’s placed a heavy load on IT organizations within those entities. And it’s prompted some business leaders to look for outside help in the form of managed services providers.
This year the managed service market is expected to be worth $173.4 billion worldwide, according to Statista. That’s a big step up from the $155.91 billion valuation of this space just last year. And the managed services market is expected to continue growing from there – reaching an estimated $193 billion in 2019, $214.8 billion in 2020, and more than $296 billion in 2023.
Yet for all its uptake and projected growth, Trevor Morgan argues there’s a fair amount of confusion over what managed services are and how businesses can benefit from them. Ciena’s senior manager of services marketing notes that managed services are different from technical support in that the former is proactive whereas technical support is reactive. He adds that managed services can deliver greater value than simply taking the management of devices and networks off the plates for in-house IT teams.
“A high-value managed services offer doesn’t simply serve as a vehicle for outsourcing basic network monitoring activities,” he writes. “Instead, it becomes a partnership between the customer’s IT staff and the services organization, one that allows for augmenting the customer’s in-house capabilities with the provider’s unique blend of technical expertise.”
Ciena’s Managed Network Services address
• Change management: The company says that with its expertise, businesses benefit from fewer changes backed out, improved risk assessment, increased stability, and reduced outages.
• Event management: Ciena says this aspect of its solution provides organizations with better response times, proactive remediation, and intelligent correlation.
• Incident management: Ciena adds its managed services can provide businesses and other organizations with better efficiency and staff utilization, improved customer and user satisfaction, and reduced business impacts due to incidents.
• Problem management: Ciena explains that knowledge management, permanent solutions, and reduced incident volumes are among the additional benefits that organizations using its managed services solutions realize.
“Customers who really care about managed services are the ones who cannot risk the negative repercussions in the instance that severe network outages lock up their business,” Morgan says. “They need the assurance that expert personnel are using the latest tools and automation to keep an eye on the network, to look for anomalies in the sea of event messages coming from the network, and to take care of incidents rapidly as they arise.”
To learn more about how managed services can help your business meet its goals, join TMC (News - Alert) and its partners at MSP Expo, Jan. 30 through Feb. 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The MSP Expo program includes representatives from 128 Technology, Accedian, AVANT, Brandywine Technology, Continuum, CoreDial (News - Alert), Corporate Blue, Digium, Google Cloud, HyperGrid, InfoSecEnforcer.com, IR, Jive Communications, KodaCloud, net2phone, netsapiens, Nuspire, OPAQ Networks, Pax8, Presh Marketing solutions, Smith.ai, STASH Secure Data, Steadfast, This Solution, Uber, Wildix, Yottabyte, and ZeroStack (News - Alert). Click here to register.
Edited by Maurice Nagle