Within the cloud they can increase their ARPU by creating tiers of high-end experienced users to create a management capability for the enterprise to manage the service but not the infrastructure. And although there is more competition as carriers recognize the benefits of offering managed services, standing out and differentiating will capture revenue.
Analysts predict that the market will generate $226 million within the next five years. IT managers will allocate between 7% and 30% of their budgets to some sort of cloud service.
Vendors also play an important role in this vision and strategy; they not only provide the technology but they can show carriers how to create new revenue. Carriers need to establish partnerships that allow them to deliver network automation across their customers' entire portfolios. The conversation is now about partnership: generating more leads, branding and developing go-to-market strategies.
Going forward, 51% of companies will have some form of cloud computing service. Clearly, cloud is more than a marketing term; it is now becoming a vision and strategy within many enterprises. Are you heading for the cloud or will you be stuck offering just point products?
Managed services: Critical success factors
- Move away from point products and offer a range of solutions
- When deploying services, you need to achieve scale
- Increase the time to revenue
- Contain ARPU erosion by offering differentiation
- Increase share of current high-value customers
- Create pervasive open network infrastructure to enable dynamic business models
- Create stickiness through customer loyalty by differentiation
Lauren Robinette is principal analyst for ACG Research's managed service business. Contact her at [email protected] or follow her on twitter at www.twitter.com/robin12lauren