From the 2100 respondents to its eWorld 2001 Survey, IDC found that 15 percent of companies had either purchased MSP services, or were interested in doing so within the next 12 months. Reasons cited included access to new technologies and gaining efficiencies. Australia, China, Japan and Korea were among the countries in Asia Pacific where companies were surveyed.
The analyst organisation anticipated opportunities for MSPs growing--either as individual companies or in partnership with larger players as part of an aggregated suite of services. Yet IDC also cautioned that MSPs face similar challenges to ASPs and NSPs.
Karen James, national operational services manager at integrator Dimension Data, doesn't believe it has been effected by any negative market perceptions of ASPs. She attributes this to the fact the services the integrator provides are rolled up into MSP deliverables, rather than the company being classified solely as an MSP.
According to James, Dimension Data has seen a change in the customers which were attracted to the MSP model.
"New customers are looking at this as a model to save money in their own organisation," she said. "Our longer-term clients are looking at this and saying, 'do we really need this?'."
Manufacturing and other industries were areas James saw clients opting to take the MSP option.
"They have a lot of remote sites in country and regional Australia and they don't want to have IT staff at those locations," she said. "The model provides a lot of value to them because it enables them to manage their networks at a lower cost."
Not all organisations feel MSPs are right for their needs. A spokesperson at professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers said the organisation didn't use MSPs. -It's simply not considered a necessity for us," the spokesperson said. -We are capable of handling our needs in-house."
Although it hasn't yet used MSPs, Andrew Powell, director-chief technology officer at investment bank Merrill Lynch, said it was currently looking at migrating some of its IT requirements to that model.
Powell said the potential cost reductions were the main reason it was looking at MSPs. -Generally, IT departments have to head this way," he said. "It's not about if you do it, it's about when you do it."
Powell does see MSPs facing some perception issues from potential customers, and said it was a big decision to make. From Merrill Lynch's point-of-view, he said it was concerned about protecting its intellectual property. -You're giving your intellectual property up to someone else and asking them to manage it, and that's a big ask." For this reason, the company would only look at using an MSP for commoditised areas, such as managing procurement of PCs. The benefits he sees is increased levels of services, through service-level agreements and performance indicators.
