The Management Service Provider Option

INTRODUCTION Conventional wisdom warns companies against outsourcing their core competencies and, at one time, management fell into this category. Now, however, especially with the rise of E-business, organizations require exceptional management to survive. Because this is not always available in-house, management service providers (MSP) are springing up to fill the need. MSPs are an emerging type of vendor that lets customers outsource various aspects of information technology (IT) management. If an MSP can guarantee that an organization’s network or applications will remain up and running, and downtime will be nearly or completely eliminated, an organization should seriously consider this option. MSPs appeal, in particular, to small and mid-sized companies, as well as E-businesses, as an alternative to the expense of building their own management systems. While these businesses might require 24¥7 availability, they do not have the resources to ensure this uptime by doing their own management. However, an MSP can do so, notifying the customer of potential problems or slowdowns. In fact, some analysts predict that 50 to 70 percent of organizations will use a service provider to assist in building or hosting their E-commerce applications. In-house management costs are steep, and include manageP A Y O F F I D E A