By Bob Tarzey, analyst at Quocirca
Successful businesses have a clear idea of their core value proposition. For most, staying focused on this is what helps achieve other goals such as profitability, growth and delivering stakeholder value.
Only software companies are likely to say that their value comes from delivering high performance, reliable and secure applications. However, most other businesses now rely on software applications to ensure they can deliver their core value proposition effectively.
Despite this reliance, increasingly the same given business does not need to be an expert in IT to achieve this; it does not even need to run the necessary systems on its own premises.
Find the right third party to work with and the running of all or part of a given organisation’s IT requirements can be trusted to a partner who sees ensuring high performance, scalable, reliable, compliant and secure applications as their core value proposition.
For mid-market organisations this is a double-edged sword; despite the obvious benefits, entrust the task to the wrong partner and the intended goal of delivering more reliable applications may be lost and the business derailed.
The Quocirca whitepaper looks at the issues mid-market businesses (500–5,000 employees) must consider when working out how and where to run the various applications that they rely on. It looks at whether they should they keep old ones in-house and what the options are for deploying new ones. It also looks at the types of managed service providers (MSP) and the benefits to be expected when partnering with one.
