Report: Managed Services Growing Up

The report, titles "Enterprise Service Management Strategies Shape Service Provider Choices," indicates that as enterprises become more sophisticated about their approach to service management, managed service providers are evolving to offer more visibility, monitoring capability and interactive control over outsourced and managed services operations.

"While outsourcing and managed services have become more prominent, many CIOs have backed away from using them because they required giving up day-to-day control over IT resources," said Mary Johnston Turner, an analyst at Summit Strategies. "It's clear that both sides of the industry are upping the ante."

Turner indicated that the maturation could mean big profits for channel partners down the road. Already vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, SevenSpace, Digex and NaviSite are expanding channel efforts as they expand their managed services offerings, she said.

The report also said that emphasis on service management and business alignment is changing the way enterprises evaluate and select managed services and outsourcing providers overall. In the report, Turner said that until recently, organizations evaluating outsourcing and managed services arrangements relied heavily on pricing models and service-level agreement (SLA) contracts to assure that service providers would stay in sync with business needs.

"As a new generation of management automation tools become available, service providers have the opportunity to change the way their offerings are managed and made visible to their customers," Turner said. "The way enterprises define their service management strategies has dramatic ramifications for the types of evaluation criteria they apply to purchase decisions."

One manifestation of these changes is the rise of management portals and services. Portals once limited to historic trend reporting are now interactive and realtime, Turner said. Specifically, she hailed portal technologies that enable customers to take on administrative functions and change policies on the fly.