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Credit Crunch Winners – Managed IT Services
It wasn’t so long ago that most of the evenings TV entertainment involved buying a house, botching a renovation and selling quickly at vast profit due to rampant housing inflation.
Now, however, Halloween TV included “Credit Crunch Winners” where former dragon Richard Farleigh ran around looking at those entrepreneurs who are seeing something to be cheerful about. Iceland and Aldi were featured heavily and sales are up as we seek cheaper alternatives.
Also featured was a company that supply a cost effective remote PA service. These services have been around a while but are now in vogue as business avoids recruiting when they can outsource. We see the same opportunities in web development and managed it services as more and more businesses seek to secure external help rather than build expensive in house capability.
As the recession kicks in we will see new business models spring up – so if anyone is needing something outsourced and want to be inventive let us know.
Will the recession accelerate Managed IT Services uptake and other pay as you go approaches?
Now that the Bank of England have come clean and pointed out that there is an elephant in the room (they’ve used the recession word) I guess we need to think through how that elephant impacts the wee world we inhabit.
For us that world is web development as well as the pay as you go services that we provide such as hosting and web support. I’m sure we’ll see some push back on pricing – that’s only to be expected – but I guess we’ll just have to stand our ground and point out that the services we supply are to aid the sales effort of the companies we support.
My gut feeling is that pay as you go services such as managed IT services and the web support type services we offer should increase in popularity. When times are tight businesses become more focussed on outsourcing rather than building things in house or investing in large capital projects – so cost effective solutions like managed IT services should see an upswing.
We’ll see how things shake out – but recessions have a habit of throwing up innovations and new ways of working. So pretty soon I suspect that the elephant in the room may well prove to be available on a monthly subscription basis – who knows?
When Managed IT services don’t work
The wee ASP service we use to monitor our various servers is pretty neat. But the business model is very sneaky – the more monitors you put in place the more it costs. Trouble is ….. you become obsessed with knowing what is going on – so you end up adding in more and more monitors.
it is good stuff – but I’m starting to feel addicted – and 6 months ago I was clean (to steal a phrase from another world). Nonetheless I wouldn’t/couldn’t be wihout it.
We’ve got an Edinburgh customer who is big on managed IT services – but to be fair I don’t think addiction is in their business plan.
Impressed with some managed IT services
We’ve been using a managed IT service for a wee while now and it’s became such a part of what we do we no longer notice that its from a thrid party. I guess that must be a sign of the service working. The managed IT service we run watches server activity and flags up issues before they become big issues. Its a pay as you go IT management service and some of the bills are extremely low on a month to month basis – so thats nice. For the company running the server monitoring software it must be producing some decent income by the time you add up all the wee fees.
This bodes well for one of our customers I guess (Network ROI in Edinburgh) they offer a range of managed IT services and I guess as more and more businesses just need something that works and doesnt bust the bank that things will go from strength to strength. I wonder if we’ll get the website related work?
