The Future of Managed Services

The IT Managed Services market is predicted to reach $229 billion globally in 2020.

 
What’s driving this incredible proliferation?

From the SMB marketplace to the Fortune 100, technology operations are challenging. Departments grow organically and typically lack business-driven outcomes. Most internal operations teams strive to maintain the established order but struggle to advance or achieve a right-sized, streamlined operation. Technology executives realize that embracing IT operations as a service evolution is vital to the long-term success of their businesses. Break-Fix IT is dead. Today’s technology doesn’t just support profitable opportunities, it drives them. The new norm involves full-stack technology operations with a focus on continuous improvement and continuous delivery (CI/CD) that exceed the needs and pace of the business.

The market incorporates a long list of IT Managed Service Providers (MSP). Their services are commonly used for operational enhancements and predictable financial optimizations. In this modern age, everybody has or needs IT operations. With the level of global IT operations consumption being what it is, is it practical to assume a small IT group can be as efficient as an MSP? Your MSP should be a purpose-built appliance (an engineered system with a specific task and highly measured value) to run IT operations at scale. The size may vary (which is crucial to acknowledge when seeking the right partner at the right price). An engineered system with one primary function, sold at scale, will always outperform a device that’s not. It’s time to embrace IT as a service and expect more from providers.

Traditional infrastructure and development operations are fundamental demands, not strategic business initiatives. We define Technology Operations as the convergence of infrastructure and development operations. Managed Service providers need to elevate their baseline offerings and accelerate customer environments to holistically managed technology operations. In short, they need to merge people, process, and technology.

External partnerships can be risky. Find a partner who provides technology operations with low levels of customization. A common pitfall for MSPs is allowing customers to dictate how services are delivered, which causes detrimental deviations from standard operations and proven methodologies. For comparison, don’t hire Disney to make a movie and then dictate how Disney should make the movie. In other words, don’t over-customize your MSP’s services. Think of it as a machine. Good data goes in and good data should come out. Don’t make your MSP fit you. Find an MSP that already fits you.

How does one identify a service that’s appropriate for their business? Every external partnership represents a risk analysis balanced against potential opportunity costs. Anexinet commits to delivering intelligent IT operations tailored to each customer’s needs—without ambiguity and complexity. Our mission to enable a great digital experience powers our full-stack solutions from Advisory Services, Digital Development, Infrastructure Services, and full-circle with hands-on technology operations.

How it works:

Our base “MONITOR” services focus on managed NOC operations. Running a successful business means maintaining infrastructure connectivity and uptime from data closets and data centers into the cloud. There may not be anything attractive or paradigm-shifting in monitoring and alerting, but it is a foundational pillar for successful business operations. We work with our customers to define their mission-critical workloads and offer real-time information and dynamic thresholds to increase availability and reliability. From traditional three-tier application monoliths to modern containers and cloud-native apps, we deliver immediate value through insights into performance, normal and abnormal behaviors, and dynamic dependency-maps to limit false alerts and increase mean time to resolution. The combined value is more uptime and stability for a predictable per-device cost model.

To benefit from a shared labor pool staffed 24x7x365 with simple per-device pricing, and keep critical workloads operating at peak performance, you need Anexinet’s “RESPOND” service-tier. Choose your mission-critical applications and services from cloud to closet; our NOC watches those application stacks and dependencies 24×7. In the event of a fault or failure, our engineers will respond and take pre-approved actions to restore triggered alarms.

While foundational services are the real accelerators for all customers, scalable to a global enterprise, there’s more value to be had from a strategic digital consultancy. OPERATE services encompass a suite of IT operations services, allowing our customers to offload management activities for cloud, infrastructure, disaster recovery, development operations, Office365, vulnerability, and much more. Anexinet has taken traditional NOC services and alert response two steps further. Our capabilities deliver strategic value to customers in line with our core mission. Our base out-of-the-box services are charged with Algorithmic IT Operations (AIOps) tools that use machine learning pattern recognition to increase and accelerate your IT Operations from reactive to proactive. Combining these services with our expertise in development operations, we offer unique value by delivering AIOps maturity and the consolidated toolchains that optimize site reliability to empower your IT operations to meet business demand. To learn more about everything Anexinet can do for your organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to help you get started.