Survey: Managed Service Providers Profit From Virtualization
Here’s an interesting statistic: Managed service providers that have virtualization expertise say their new business revenues have grown 34 percent over the past 18 months, according to a recent survey sponsored by Nimsoft.
Admittedly, statistics can be tricky to interpret. Most managed service providers on the MSPmentor 100 list are growing far faster than 34 percent annually. But the Nimsoft-sponsored survey caught my attention because the link between managed services and virtualization is unquestionable.
How’s this for ironic: Many midsize and large organizations moved to virtualization to “simplify” their IT environments, consolidate servers and improve power efficiencies. But many of those virtualized environments actually became more difficult to manage as companies struggled to keep track of their physical and virtual assets.
That’s where MSPs enter the picture. If you’re still getting up to speed on virtualization. I would strongly recommend that you check out press coverage of this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. Here’s a quick Google link to the VMworld news coverage.
I am not too surprised by this. At least in our space, we find clients are more willing to deploy task-specific servers when using virtualization than when not. As we charge per-endpoint, management fees often rise while hardware fees drop. I see this as a great opportunity since our margins on the management services are significantly greater than on our hardware services.