Survey: Plenty Of Room For More Managed Services

Providing proactive managed services for fixed, regular fees may be a goal for many small IT shops, but more than half still describe their business models as "break-fix," according to a survey of more than 2,000 North American IT businesses. <P> Just 17.6 percent of the 2,256 VARs, solution providers and IT consultants surveyed by MSP platform vendor Kaseya described their business as "fully outsourced IT." Slightly more -- about 22.6 percent -- bill for their services with a flat monthly fee. But more than 80 percent still operate a break-fix or project-based IT practice, according to the survey conducted by Kaseya late last month. <P> More than half of the surveyed companies, 52.9 percent, described their business as "break-fix incident response," while 55.1 percent said they bill hourly for IT services. That's compared to 22.3 percent who have billing structures based on time blocks. <P> The Kaseya survey provides an interesting snapshot of business practices at IT shops that service very small companies and organizations -- nearly 90 percent of respondents reported total PCs under management at 1,000 or fewer, including 59.1 percent who touch less than 250 systems total. Just 10.7 percent of those surveyed said they had between 1,001 and 5,000 computers under contract. <P> When asked to name the "biggest challenge" facing their organization, 45.5 percent selected system monitoring -- more than double the next biggest headache, security. Remote system monitoring is a key component of the proactive IT management model touted by Kaseya and other MSP vendors. <P> On a grimmer note, nearly one-fifth of respondents reported laying off staff to maintain profitability in the current economic recession, while about 10 percent said they had cut employees' pay. More than 42 percent expected their company revenue to decline this year as compared to 2008, with about 23 percent fearing it would drop "substantially."