Over the past year, there have been significant moves in the IT outsourcing market. Vodafone signed a 10-year deal with Microsoft, AT&T signed a deal with Ericsson, and Verizon and HCL Technologies signed a contract worth billions in just the past year alone. The trend is towards more deals, stronger partnerships and long-term managed services engagements. As IDC points out, in 2023, there were around 1,800 deals signed worth more than $100 billion and the company believes this is a trend that will continue well into the next few years. Gartner concurs, predicting IT services are to become ‘the largest segment of IT spending in 2024’.
The move towards managed services solutions is driven by four core factors: access to skills, cost optimisation, access to next-generation technology, and agility. The skills market remains volatile – companies want to attract and retain top talent, but talented people are expensive to find and hold onto. Managed services deftly sews the gap shut – providers have invested into creating a skilled workforce capable of delivering multiple layers of expertise across emergent and foundational technologies.
Using managed services, companies can simply sidestep the skills issue.
A trusted partner with the right technology and skillset will walk into your business and deliver exactly what you need. Which introduces the cost factor. In addition to minimising reliance on costly skills and hires, companies benefit from the optimisation provided by managed services. Your organisation doesn’t need to carry the burden of infrastructure because your service provider will manage, maintain and secure your technology. The cost savings are felt in the reduced need to invest into on-premises hardware that costs time and money to maintain; the immediacy of cloud-based service provision that can be scaled up or down to suit business demand; and the optimisation of IT team performance.
Now, your IT team is focused on resolving challenges within the business, optimising internal processes and strategy while managed services optimise your environment. Collaborating with IT, managed services should help you create a robust, future-ready service capable of helping you better navigate the challenges that come with building a digital-ready business.
Managed services reduce the myriad pressures that technology place on the business.
Companies can reduce the strain with a provider capable of ensuring robust security while reducing downtime and improving resource capacity. The cost of a breach, the expensive delays of downtime – the statistics have been shared across multiple headlines and reports and most companies know exactly how hard these incidents hit the bottom line. Taking the pressure off is a smart way to save money and time.
IDC also points out that artificial intelligence (AI) is playing no small role in the managed services trend. Companies are embedding the agility of AI into their services and this translates into increasingly streamlined, capable and speedy solutions that benefit the business, and managed services are helping them doing it scale.
Finally, it’s the agility offered by companies like Mint, providing an array of managed services that can be customised to suit specific needs and market demands. We help you build a roadmap, designing a strategy that’s aligned with your organisation’s requirements and expectations and that helps you prioritise the services you need for the future. From security through to workplace solutions to enterprise cloud and business services, we help you create a technology profile designed for growth and transformation.