Things just aren’t the way they used to be. Your business is more digitally-driven and data-centric than ever before. And your success depends more and more on your IT department. It’s getting harder to separate software/hardware support and management from your front-end operations. How do you avoid miscommunication, efficiency and security problems? The short answer: Managed application hosting.
Managed application hosting outsources your support and infrastructure services, and helps you take strategic control of your expanding IT requirements. By outsourcing critical applications, you can lower the costs for a whole range of parameters: deployment, support and more. And you can increase your ROI at the same time.
What’s not to love?
Managed application hosting: The business case
If you’re like most companies, you rely on a variety of applications for marketing, planning, online visibility and customer management. Your IT staff is usually responsible for implementing and maintaining these applications. But what happens if your IT department and your main stakeholders get their wires crossed? You’re looking at confused end-users and much longer deployment times.
For example, look at the difficulties many businesses have with enterprise resource planning (ERP) – an application that’s surprisingly hard to deploy. ZDNet examines a series of statistics on these difficulties, highlighting the issues with ERP implementation. Over the past several years, companies have consistently reduced the size of their ERP budgets, as follows:
2011: $10.5 million average
2012: $7.1 million average
2013: $2.8 million average
However, even though average budgets were shrinking, the project completion timetables remained about the same:
2011: 16 months average
2012: 17.8 months average
2013: 16.3 months average
And in 2013, 66% of companies reported that they received less than 50% of ERP’s benefits – a dramatic decrease from prior years.
ZDNet writer Dan Kusnetzky observes that projects like Enterprise Resource Planning often fail due to conflict between business leaders and IT team members. The groups have different approaches to management and implementation of key applications, and these differences can slow projects down and negatively impact the bottom line.
Managed application hosting sidesteps these issues by handing over critical applications to a competent third-party provider. When you have a dedicated company managing all your support and infrastructure services – without the miscommunication, differing opinions and crossed wires – your entire company runs more smoothly.
And again – what’s not to love about that?
For more information on managed hosting, read our article here.