Most Functions Outsourced to MSPs Are Storage/Recovery

Nimsoft released the results of its Enterprise Requirements for MSPs 2011 survey, which reveals the growing embrace of Managed Services Providers (MSPs) by large and mid-sized companies nationwide.

The survey, conducted in association with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), collected responses, experiences and opinions from executives, mid-level managers and individual IT contributors. All participants were currently engaged with an MSP, planning to engage an MSP, or had used MSP services in the past.

IT professionals indicated that their top three motivations for engaging an MSP were the opportunity to reduce costs (41%), access to improved technical expertise/depth (37%), and the ability to better focus on core business (36%).

“The survey clearly demonstrates that MSPs are extremely attractive partners for IT organizations that are under growing pressure to do more with less,” said Phil LaForge, vice president of the Nimsoft service provider business. “As they continue to gain market momentum, MSPs will keep evolving their capabilities to offer clients an even more robust range of high-value management services.”

As a measure of how enthusiastically the industry is embracing the MSP model, nearly one-third (31%) of respondents – and half of all surveyed IT executives-indicated that they could envision a time when all of their IT would be managed by MSPs.

Additional highlights of the survey include:

• The most common management functions currently outsourced to MSPs are Storage/Recovery (56%) and Service Desk/Help Desk (44%).
• Of those planning additional MSP outsourcing of management functions, Service Desk/Help Desk is the most common priority.
• A majority of respondents currently engaged with an MSP indicated that Virtual Servers (68%), Data Center Infrastructure (61%), and Physical Servers (56%) are under MSP management.

“In general, the research indicated a broad existing practice and future interest in use of MSPs across a number of technology and organization areas,” said Jim Frey, EMA managing research director. “We recommend that any organization seeking to balance business priorities against near-term and long-term operating costs consider MSPs, either as a means to supplement existing staff and organizations or as a primary approach to operations.”

Nimsoft recently announced Nimsoft Unified Manager, a multi-tenant IT Management as-a-Service solution that combines infrastructure monitoring and ready-to-use ITIL-based service management capabilities in a single solution. By unifying monitoring and service management, Nimsoft Unified Manager empowers MSPs to optimize their corporate clients’ delivery of IT services across various types of infrastructure-including public and private cloud environments.