What Enterprise CIOs Want From Cloud MSPs in 2020 -

What do enterprise CIOs (chief information officers) and IT decision makers want from their MSPs? Some answers surfaced in a recent Apps Associates survey.

First, a little background. Apps Associates is a Top 200 Public Cloud MSP for 2019. The company is an enterprise-class MSP focused on cloud database migrations and managed services wrapped around Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, Salesforce and NetSuite deployments. The company is owned by BV Investment Partners, a private equity firm.

Apps Associates recently surveyed 300 IT decision makers and CIOs at companies that have $100 million to $5 billion in annual revenues. Those companies also run Oracle for their primary business applications.

Cloud Applications and MSPs: Key Enterprise Customer Needs

Among the key survey findings:

Almost nine out of ten respondents indicate an MSP partnership would help them better secure the enterprise (86%), improve cloud consumption (86%), and position the IT team to focus more on critical corporate initiatives (86%).

More than four out of five respondents say an MSP could help the organization reduce TCO (84%), aid in the successful migration to the cloud (84%) and simplify the complexity of a hybrid/multi-cloud environment (83%).

IT decision makers (ITDMs) who confirmed their company had never worked with an MSP were much more likely to report staffing problems, with seven out of ten (73%) responding that their IT team was either not fully staffed or had experienced staffing issues. In comparison, among enterprises who use an MSP, only two out of ten (20%) report staffing challenges.

When asked about the business factors preventing ITDMs from getting maximum value out of their Oracle applications, the most popular response was security update complexity (46%). Three out of five (60%) ITDMs say their company has made IT projects aligned with security their top priority.

MSPs can also help customers with rising licensing costs (41%) and licensing compliance (39%). Nearly one-third (29%) say the business factor preventing them from getting maximum value from their Oracle applications is release management uncertainty, while almost the same percentage (28%) say there is uncertainty around deploying new functionality.

A great majority of ITDMs (80%) believe an Oracle audit is likely, and that having an MSP positioned alongside their organization could help with negotiating more favorable terms with Oracle (82%).