Businesses today demand measurable results that create economic value. As organizations adopt managed services to navigate IT complexity, reduce risk, and achieve strategic goals, there is a shift from simply ensuring uptime and service availability to delivering real business outcomes. The focus has shifted from ‘uptime to results’.
How is managed services adoption changing?
According to a recent Cisco Demand Survey, more than 88% of organizations expect to increase their spending on managed services by more than 10% in the next 12 to 18 months. And they are increasingly looking for managed services that contribute to their core business initiatives.
The top five priorities for managed services are changing focus, including accelerating innovation (85%), improving customer experience (82%), optimizing supply chain (79%), achieving sustainability goals (76%), and managing risk and compliance. represents . (75%). You are no longer limited to supporting IT back-office functions. This is about driving business strategy and enabling a more agile organization.
Track the evolution of managed services
To understand these developments and their impact on suppliers: let’s do it Explore the Cisco Managed Services Maturity Continuum.
The next phase of managed services success will require providers to transform critical elements of their practices to meet evolving market demands for business-relevant outcomes, with product management, sales, marketing, and customer success each requiring significant changes. The focus on product features and device-level support that characterizes many traditional project and catalog-based managed services allows vendors to deliver the integrated experiences, KPIs and reporting insights customers want, limiting access to new buying centers and providing greater relevance. must be provided.
Point solutions can address specific needs, but they often fall short of addressing IT complexity and providing the scalable, flexible, integrated services that today’s businesses require. In contrast, a platform-based approach complemented by an ecosystem enables more complex outcomes, resonates with a broader buyer audience, and addresses more specific industry needs through increased data visibility and additional context gained through customized experiences. You can. At the same time, platforms and point products unlock new revenue potential while reducing provider costs for building and operating new services at scale. Doesn’t that sound like a win-win when it comes to identifying key success criteria?
Advanced Managed Services: From SOC/NOC to AI Operations
Risk and compliance management are the most important business issues facing all customers, and heightened security and compliance requirements are driving increased investments in managed security services. Skills shortages, the growing threat surface based on distributed work environments, and the sophistication of attackers (the dark side of AI) leave most organizations with little choice but to hire experts.
The most advanced managed services are delivered by a common SOC/NOC that leverages AI Operations (AIOps) to significantly reduce the time it takes to identify threats, remediate them, and identify root causes or threat vectors. This centralized approach not only improves service efficiency, but also ensures a more proactive and security-focused attitude to managing your IT environment through evolved service contracts and reporting that focuses more on outcomes than availability or uptime.
Imagine using your wide area and access networks as distributed sensor arrays, gathering additional context from other application delivery platforms, and gaining insights from users and endpoint devices. Support staff will be better equipped to serve the customer/user base, and security experts will be able to define intelligent access policies and receive alerts related to unauthorized access to help organizations achieve their compliance goals.
Today, service providers can achieve this by leveraging the Cisco platform as part of their services. AIOps-based delivery complements real-time monitoring with predictive analytics and automated remediation to ensure issues are resolved before they impact the business. The result is improved customer satisfaction. Check it out! And providers will find that operational excellence is a path that can help them improve their operational skills and support their teams to deliver new levels of service. Check, check!
Moving through the maturity continuum unlocks many levers for success along the journey. Over time, we expect there will be greater opportunities to drive customer value and partner profitability through more flexible consumption models measured in outcome-based metrics, advancements in AI-enabled offerings, greater automation, and service levels.
Build success today with results-based managed services
Cisco technology and partner managed services resources can help providers more efficiently transition to results-oriented services across networking, security, collaboration, observability, and AI-enabled data center technology platforms. We are committed to working with MSPs to provide technology optimized for their unique needs, supporting cross-domain architectures, increasing operational automation, and providing open APIs and telemetry to support differentiated services. .
Our resource library also includes assets for partner products, marketing, service delivery, customer success, and sales teams to accelerate launch and optimization of MSP services across the lifecycle by up to 50%, resulting in faster time to market.
Moving forward with innovation and speed
The industry has a lot of ground to cover to achieve this change. However, we take encouragement from the following groups: Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA); The award annually recognizes early innovators and industry-leading successes, including managed services practices.
cisco Selected as a winner in past years For Managed Services Innovation and we are delighted to congratulate our respected partner Logicalis on achieving Technology Services Industry Association recognition. TSIA Award for Management Services KPI innovation in 2024!
For many years, Logicalis has delivered tremendous value to organizations around the world by combining Cisco’s world-class technology with a variety of market-leading value-added services. And our commitment to best practice and assurance of the highest level of service is proven through our achievements. Cisco Services Designated across portfolios. AIOps Optimization in Logicalis Today digital fabric platform We are transforming existing service metrics to meet our customers’ changing needs for business performance. They improved service delivery metrics by focusing on user experience, usability, security compliance, environmental goals, and recommendations for measurably reducing carbon emissions. The result is an impactful, real-time KPI example that demonstrates how Logicalis increases customer efficiency and modernizes infrastructure. For example, reported customer outcomes include a 22% reduction in user complaints, a 23% reduction in carbon emissions, a strengthened security posture, and a 38% reduction in threat exposure.
An exciting step toward increasing managed service maturity and customer value! Congratulations to the Logicalis team for being recognized for their industry innovation. Thank you so much for your amazing partnership!
The future of managed services
Looking to the future, the shift from uptime to results will continue to gain momentum. Cisco is committed to supporting our partners on this journey by delivering innovative technology platforms, driving affinity, and recognizing and rewarding performance along the way.
At next week’s Cisco Partner Summit #CiscoPS24, we’re excited to explore more opportunities with attending providers and achieve success together.
#Let’s take care of it!
Learn more:
Deliver customer outcomes with managed services from Cisco and Deloitte
Managed services led by Cisco Partner Program providers
The 3 Ps of Partner Managed Services: Platform, Preference, and Performance
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