The concentration of data that companies now have to deal with is one of the core concerns leading them to engage with outsourcing and managed services providers. Eamon Moore, CEO of E-Mit was one of many industry experts who noted that "people now have to take a really long look at how they manage the cost involved in the size of their data. There are back-up costs spiralling out of control, with data increasing all the time and people are asking what’s the best way they can deal with that."
Johnathan Ferris, head of design services with BT Ireland, noted that "very few companies" have a worthwhile "big data strategy", while Ken Breen of Qualcom added that with many companies finding that, "the amount of data [is] increasing exponentially; the management of this data is becoming more costly and complex". As a result, the Qualcom CEO said organisations are outsourcing their data related functions "as a means of reducing cost and ensuring they have the capacity to manage all of their data".
Matthew McCann, sales director with Ricoh Ireland, agreed on this point. "Many businesses don’t have the in-house systems or expertise to manage ever-increasing volumes of data, so they call on external experts to manage the information flows through their organisation."
McCann said this is a particularly noticeable trend in sectors such as financial services, law and the pharmaceutical industry, where high volumes of sensitive data is handled and "highly stringent regulations and compliance targets" are in place.
Paul Kenny, head of infrastructure and cloud computing with Dell weighed in saying that to "get ahead" of regulations and growing IT security demands "the requirement for flexible information security services that lower the risk of breaches, downtime and non-compliance is a necessity".
Volume & complexity
Kenny estimated that many businesses are experiencing a ten-fold increase in the data they handle, leading to managed security and intrusion prevention services rising in popularity. While this volume increase is a driving factor towards choosing particular managed services, Karen O’Connor, general manager for service delivery, Datapac, added that other factors such as data complexity, access requirements, security considerations, flexibility and scalability all play a part in the decision of what services are required.
"In our experience, it is often the risks associated with loss of data, and the comparable reliability of extra disaster recovery options available through an outsourced solution that is drawing the market in that direction," added O’Connor. Breen too would say that, "managed disaster recovery solutions are becoming particularly popular".
Print services
It is not only volumes of data that have increased dramatically in recent years though. In general terms, outsourcing and managed services have continued to grow in popularity since the on-set of the economic crisis. However, BT’s Ferris was keen to point out that this hasn’t led to any major increase in pricing from vendors within the industry. "It’s actually quite the opposite," he claims, reasoning that the "downward pressure" companies are under has to be reciprocated by outsourcing and managed service providers. They must, he said, tread a fine line where they’re asked to supply more solutions than previously but at prices comparable to years when those services weren’t quite as developed.
With the industry still flourishing then, O’Connor said managed print services and endpoint management were "noticeably growing" in particular. Regarding the former, Daniel Rafferty, country manager with Epson Ireland said that managed print services will appeal to companies "having to cut budgets" and make "their money work harder", with some managed services allowing for pre-determined printing supplies by utilising a dedicated web portal to request supplies as needed, cutting out fears of overstocking.
Ricoh’s McCann said many managed print services relate directly back to the data argument. He noted how a lot of clients now want "scanning and archiving [services] to eliminate the risks associated with paper based storage", a solution with the added benefit of "quicker access to business critical documents" for employees too.
In addition, McCann noted that a growing number of companies are becoming interested in the concept of managed digital mailrooms; a hybrid solution which, he explained, linked "onsite print rooms and shared service centres" to streamline the process of customer letters being received and distributed.
Endpoint management
Returning to O’Connor’s topic of endpoint management, she said companies who have taken advantage of this option have seen how it can be "massively effective in reducing IT administration overheads". It does so by providing tools that allow administrators to centrally manage devices that are often dispersed across different offices or even, as O’Connor noted, "often in different countries".
BT’s Ferris said that expectation levels of customers have soared in recent years, adding that "proactive solutions" are now what’s required. He took the example of enhanced network management as an area that has shown enormous growth of late.
"It’s a really big thing in the market because you can put your assets and your applications away somewhere in the data centre with a provider and not have really strong, resilient network management," said Ferris. "However, now people are looking for that proactive element – what is the health of my network, what is the capacity and what are the trends I should know about?"
Qualcom’s Breen said that one trend he has noticed in recent months has been an increasing amount of organisations looking to fully outsource their helpdesk function. A traditional outsourcing and managed services staple, the benefits of releasing internal IT departments from their duties while the managed service provider handles day-to-day queries is still a powerful draw for many organisations.
Kenny agreed with Breen that helpdesk support is still a major area of interest for customers but added that other long recognisable managed services are still enjoying interest. "Project management services, IT consulting and advisory [services] are still seeing strong demand in recent months," said Kenny.
However, he did add that "newer services" such as "data centre management, cloud infrastructure services like desktop as a service, systems management as a service, virtual server infrastructure in the cloud, application maintenance and modernisation as well as mobile device management" are all experiencing "an explosion" of interest lately.
BYOD
Indeed, the subject of bring your own device (BYOD) was a recurring theme when experts were asked about the current outsourcing and managed services market. With many companies at their wits end on how to manage the incessant stream of mobile devices making their way into the workplace and on to their networks, managed service providers have been under pressure to provide, quick, easy-to-manage responses to the issue.
E-Mit founder Moore said that for starters businesses want a BYOD managed service "that’s cloud-based and allows the company or the managed services provider to have access to that information anytime and anywhere". John Casey, sales director with Trilogy Technologies added that nowadays customers anticipate having the option to adopt services that allow them to easily "wipe the device if it’s stolen, lost or mislaid".
Far from these new demands putting managed service providers on the back foot though, Datapac’s O’Connor was of the opinion that "the availability of managed services supporting BYOD" has driven innovation in the sector. She pointed to the growth in better mobile management and mobile security offerings as evidence, and it’s a notion that Dell-man Kenny agreed with, "I believe the BYOD phenomenon has added to the capability of managed service vendors, and potentially allowed for a lowered cost of ownership in service delivery," he claimed.
Policies in place
Kenny explained that in "complete outsource scenarios", the physical device which the end-user utilises to interact with business applications is "normally owned by the provider". Therefore, "not having a ‘complex’ piece of equipment on the desk reduces the requirement to visit the user desk side to resolve an issue related to hardware, such as hard drive failure or OS corruption," he said.
Ricoh’s McCann meanwhile added that the surge in interest for all things BYOD is giving businesses "a real push" to ensure there are policies in place ensuring that confidential data and documents are always safeguarded. With O’Connor saying that users are now often valuing "flexibility and choice" above security concerns, the ability for managed service providers to offer such safeguards is increasingly welcomed by worried CTOs.
"More and more Irish organisations are outsourcing the management of this area to managed service providers," said McCann, "they have the expertise and systems in place to remove the security and compliance issues associated with BYOD."
Automation capability
With BYOD a dominant theme of the past 12 months, there will of course be more development in this area over the next year as well, and Datapac’s O’Connor said the most interesting development could arise from the fact that tablets will become the tools of choice for many workers.
Added O’Connor, "4G availability is going to be a game changer allowing far more people to work remotely than ever before in Ireland. It will enable managed service providers and IT administrators to manage those home users or remote offices in a very real way, negating issues around system updates, patching and data transfers that currently exist on slow, legacy networks."
Beyond the mobile question though, what other areas do the experts feel will dominate the outsourcing and managed services market over the next year? For Kenny, the fact that many organisations will look for savings in their legacy environment points towards "application modernisation and application ‘re-hosting’ services" starting to win plenty of favour over the coming months. Elsewhere, he said, "automation capability" is going to become more developed, noting that "solutions which can unify, package and condense IT tasks will become more prevalent".
Ricoh sales director McCann picked e-invoicing as an area that could "really take off" throughout the rest of 2013. Elaborating, McCann said that while "technological developments will help facilitate this trend", it will also become more prevalent as the EC is "very keen to promote and harmonise e-invoicing across member states".
Continuing his point, McCann said, "the European Digital Agenda states that from January 2013, electronic and paper invoices should be treated equally. And the European Parliament has called for e-invoicing to be made mandatory in public procurement by 2016. Managed service providers with strong offerings in this area will see the benefits of this policy being put in place."
McCann, among several other outsourcing and managed services experts who spoke to ComputerScope, mentioned that we can expect the public sector to escalate the process of outsourcing non-core services in order to save costs across the board throughout the year. It was a subject touched upon by Trilogy’s Casey who added that with public and private companies more concerned about data privacy issues than in previous years, a considerable number of Irish clients may move towards Irish-based managed service providers to make sure they’re "within touching distance" of their data.
Man on street DR
Moving matters back towards the technology itself though, Qualcom CEO, Breen used the phrase "disaster recovery for the man on the street" when asked what will make an impact on the managed services sector during the next year. The key, he said, is that "with the push of a button, organisations can restore their system to any point in time".
Breen also said that the next year to 18 months will see IT management software move "from simply monitoring to include analytics as standard", while portfolio management was also on his checklist for upcoming market trends.
Managed service providers, he said, will increasingly be asked to implement new technologies to monitor the performance of systems and networks. "With the move to the cloud and companies having a mix of on-premise and cloud based systems, this will become more complex to manage and will be an important area for managed service providers to add value."
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