Managed Service Provider Week in Review

The future looks bright for the managed services space, according to a new report from INSIGHT Research. The report and a number of significant announcements this week rounded out the major happenings in the managed service provider (MSP) and cloud market.

INSIGHT's new "Managed Services in an IP World: Global Opportunities for Wireless and Wired Networks, 2013-2017" report predicts MSP services will grow at an average of 11.3 percent per year throughout the world. Domestically, overall revenues are expected to top $50 billion by 2017, with global revenues reaching $235 billion by that year. Worldwide MSP revenues were $137 billion in 2012.

SunGard Availability Services certainly realizes the potential for managed IT services, as the company announced this week it is shifting its focus to the managed sector. SunGard specializes in software and disaster recovery and plans to ramp up its managed recovery, virtualization and cloud services as part of the new effort. The new business model reflects expanded investments in new services for enterprise customers, which have come with increased security and compliance as well as IT infrastructure requirements. In tandem with the new initiative, SunGard adopted the ISO/IEC 20000 standards earlier this year to offer customers assurance that their service requirements are being met.

Luggage bigwig Samsonite LLC is the latest large enterprise to benefit from managed services. The company was looking for a fully managed colocation solution to help them migrate to the cloud and IaaS, and chose Earthlink and Broadleaf services to provide professional help. The companies are overseeing Samsonite's migration of physical IT assets to an EarthLink data center, and are also providing ongoing consulting and support with planning and management.

And Mformation Software Technologies Inc. announced its new Proactive Care Technical Catalyst initiative. The service provider is focusing on new advances in the areas of automatic and proactive technical care for mobile customers, and is working with partners Amdocs and SundaySky to deliver the solutions. The team is monitoring, detecting and interpreting technical device, data and network experience issues while demonstrating effective issue resolution. The initiative also focuses on smart cross and up-sell across channels to partners and prospective customers.