ACG Research

ACG Research
We focus on the Why before the What

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Managed Services and Cloud: Where Is Your Organization?

Does your organization have a cloud or virtualization strategy, a “green” program? Best practices indicate that if you do not, your company will ultimately lose ground because chances are that your customers are trying to gain more productivity, decrease costs and gain value through cloud, virtualization or green strategies. How you support them will either keep them as your customers or force them to evaluate other alternatives.

Most providers are focused on keeping their subscribers by delivering connectivity and other offers that focus on increasing value to keep their customers. To create a sticky environment providers must invest in technology, establish new price per usage rates or entice with subscriptions that deliver value-added services or risk becoming a commodity and being priced out by another provider.

ACG has identified some emerging and evolving trends in business, network, devices and applications likely to affect providers in 2012.
  • Build, acquire or partner to gain the missing elements of service provider connectivity, system integration capability, data center management and virtualization and the last mile reach to business customers.
  • Acquisitions to gain missing virtualization and data center cloud investment will continue (Saavis/CenturyLink, Terramark/Verizon, and NTT/OpSource).
  • Building is less likely to be a primary strategy as the time to return is too significant.
  • Partnering will be another way providers can plan cloud migration, designing and implementing cloud or virtualized solutions for their customers.
  • Vendor provided risk protection and IT service outsourcing are ways for service providers to partner with their vendors for end-to-end IT management. This partnership supports a risk sharing service and allows service providers to take on new technology with support of the vendors. New services can include LTE, IPV6, IP NGN migration, video, and CDN.
  • VARs and resellers provide another opportunity for service providers to develop agent, reselling and white label programs to reach new customers. As more businesses move away from owning, maintaining or staffing their capital investments and migrate to cloud, some of these traditional resellers will have to change business models, partner to resell services from service providers or face the threat of going out of business.
ACG has several success stories that outline the various models offered in the market today:

Cisco: Advanced technology migration services to reduce risk and increase customer value for service providers looking to stay ahead of the technology curve.

NSN: End-to-end outsourcing for service provider infrastructure on network and customer e-mail and broadband service management.

France Telecom: Takes virtualization, power reduction and system integration to new levels in their cloud initiative.

Presidio Networked Solution:
Partnerships to new levels, creating a new business in managed service with no NOC.

Click here for more business deep dives.

For more information on our cloud services, click here.


Lauren Robinette
lrobinette@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch.net

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