XaaS and Managed Services Create a Powerful Combination
There is no doubt about it: “Software is eating the world, but services are eating software.” Every day, we see customer value shifting away from products and solutions to experiences and outcomes. The powerful combination of the cloud and software as a service (SaaS) has been fueling this fast-moving trend. Beyond technology innovation, another evolution has also been at play. The clue is in the name: software as a service. As customers moved from software to SaaS, they went from simply buying a code-based product to getting a service with several new benefits:
- The agility and flexibility needed to ensure IT is not beholden to past decisions
- The ability for business leaders to deploy and scale innovative experiences delivering the desired business outcomes, often centered around transforming the customer and employee experience
- A CFO-proof business model that saves costs and reduces investment risk
Customers came to demand that every IT outcome be translated into a service, and so the as-a-service model had to extend beyond the world of code. Enter XaaS. Pronounced zaas, or referred to as “X as a service,” this term means “anything delivered as a service” and describes what buyers want: offerings that are services-led, consumption-driven and cloud-enabled to accelerate the business outcomes that companies need to be successful.
By definition, XaaS offerings must come to market as outcomes, or services, that correlate to business goals–all with a modern user experience centered around insights and telemetry to fuel more agile decision making, planning and service utilization. It is important to note that this transition is also shifting how customers define value, moving away from the speeds and feeds of the components to the experience of the outcomes. This means XaaS offerings must go to market packaged around the value of the services they deliver, not the underlying components.
In the world of IT infrastructure, the delivery of managed services has been the traditional way to sell an IT or business outcome to buyers. Cisco customers look to our provider partners to design, build, implement and operate the desired IT solution tied to a service-level agreement (SLA). But as vendors digitize core IT to be API-centric and cloud-enabled, and wrap it all with a flexible consumption model with service level objectives (SLOs), the model is changing. And our partners are already leading the way by launching as-a-service value propositions.
The question then for you in the Cisco partner community is: How do managed services and XaaS offers compare? Click on Page 2 to continue reading…
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