New IT Infrastructure Services and Service Provider Revenue
We recently took on the challenge of researching the Infrastructure as a Service market. These are new IT infrastructure services that are finally starting to catch on with enterprise buyers. As services, they replace the physical IT infrastructure owned and managed by organizations. Our market research aim here, like in our WaveLength study, is to create marketing campaigns to help network operators understand it (it’s also a great example of how to use market research as thought leadership). But back to the study results, in this first blog on the project, we talk about outsourcing IT.
But first, some background:
Brocade hired us to survey large and medium-sized enterprises. Not any enterprise, mind you, only those that outsource at least one IT function.
We wanted to know trends and adoption drivers in the IT infrastructure services market. In addition, we wanted to know enterprise IT priorities, and storage and data center issues. And to get enterprise plans for IPv6, the emerging standard for IP addresses. Finally, we wanted to know the buyer journey. To know how enterprises expect to buy new services from service providers.
IT Outsourcing Now Common in All IT Functions
Let’s now examine outsourcing, which includes both managed services and cloud services.
According to research, it is already pervasive across all IT infrastructure functions. 70% of large enterprises outsource network management. And 70% of medium-sized enterprises outsource storage management. The transition to cloud services is underway. In fact, 60% of large enterprises already deploy some type of cloud service.
Turning to IT management priorities, what does the study tell us about enterprises? First off, they want to improve performance, simplify management, and increase agility.
- 8% medium-sized and 50% of large enterprises say the top IT priority is to improve user experience. They also want to improve service quality and reliability.
- The second most common IT management priority? For 45% of both segments, they want to speed application development. This also means improving agility.
- Meanwhile, the next highest response? 44% of large enterprises want to mitigate risks of technology change.
As far as IT management goes, businesses are largely seeking simplification of their systems. They also want to improve their efficiency. Virtualization and outsourcing are continuing to rise in popularity.
New IT Infrastructure Services Just Outsourcing
So really, new IT infrastructure services like IaaS, are actually other outsourcing alternatives. It’s not a new concept at all. Companies outsource all the time, and the new cloud model is one more way to do that. In essence, new IT infrastructure services – the new boss – is pretty much the same as the old boss. Time for service providers to recognize and modernize services.
Check out what the Brocade blog has to say about our research in IT trends here.
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