We have recently completed a programme around Managed IT Services for a bunch of our clients (EI) and we gathered some useful insights in to the whole area of delivering remotely managed IT Services. Late last year we identified the need for a greater focus on this area and felt there was a sufficient context around which to build something, in particular:

• Growing need from their customer base to reduce implementation costs and maintenance costs
• Growing acceptance of new service delivery models (such as SaaS and cloud computing).
• Reliable and ubiquitous broadband access, successful take-up of software delivery models and significant investment in next generation IT architecture is accelerating enterprise adoption of the IT as a service paradigm

As the SaaS model matures, fewer enterprises require the middleware – the onus of providing vital application integration is shifting to service providers  – Applications, processors, databases are becoming utilities and charged dynamically.

Our research identified that Financial services, public sector and manufacturing have heaviest spend in IT services and already 18% – 25% of companies using some form of managed IT service, with a further 37% – 48% either planning such a move or considering (source Datamonitor)

Early in the programme we had a discussion with each of the clients, most of whom had a strong desire to “get on” the cloud. Here is some of the thoughts that came back:

• Cloud is not an architecture or infrastructure, because it is an abstraction for a relationship between the consumers and providers of services. That means that there are many approaches to cloud computing.
• Although each vendor will not be creating a different cloud, they will all feed services into the one public cloud.
• SaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors will become cloud services.
• Most of this is not new; however, what is new is the change in the mindset, involvement and availability of technology to be used by masses of people who care about what they can do with the technology, rather than how the technology is implemented.
• Not everything will become cloud computing, because many projects will require a level of privacy, performance or uniqueness that cannot be supported through the public cloud.

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