I spotted a piece in CIO Dive entitled “Managed service providers are here to save the hybrid cloud.” It starts with the Tuesday announcement of Kyndryl Consult, a business aimed at helping enterprises integrate and manage cloud-based and on-prem IT estates. Kyndryl itself is the IBM spinoff consulting business.
Let’s quote the article:
Spending on managed services for both cloud and on-prem infrastructure is expected to win a larger share of overall spending in 2023 IT budgets, accounting for 18%, up from 15% this year, according to Spiceworks Ziff Davis’ annual survey.
The trend is reflected in the number of active partnerships between CSPs and MSPs. In North America alone, AWS currently partners with 50 MSPs, including Accenture, IBM and Infosys. Google has 36, and Microsoft lists nearly 70.
“What makes a partnership successful is they’ve got a cloud, and cloud does a lot of things,” said Harish Grama, Kyndryl’s global cloud practice leader, “but it’s also very complex.”
That complexity shows up in the form of unsuccessful deployments.
Nearly one-third of technology decision-makers surveyed in a 2021 Gartner report said their organization had suffered a cloud deployment failure in the last three years.
Reasons for these failures range from integration problems and poor choice of provider to inaccurate cost estimates and unexpected cost increases.
Acknowledging this is an insight into large MSPs, there’s still insight. The data continues to say that overall managed services spend looking strong for next year, which is good. That said, think about those unsuccessful deployments. The complexity is why the value of a provider can shine, but one-third of projects failing is not a good success rate. Providers should measure this – and be able to position against competition with their success rates, and ideally include specific ROI numbers for customers to measure success against.
Those MSPs numbers are good to remember, too – when thinking about enterprise-size MSPs; there’s a size. It’s less than 200.