Our valued partner EY, recently published the Nordic IT sourcing & cloud survey 2020, which can be found here.
Around 80% of SMT Data’s Nordic customers have outsourced their mainframe and/or server infrastructures, and some of the survey’s conclusions and recommendations within the infrastructure outsourcing section (listed below), fall in line with what we are experiencing in the market:
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You should retain or even hire SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to level the playing field and be successful with your infrastructure outsourcing
- Or as we say again and again: “You may outsource your infrastructure, but you can never outsource the responsibility and control”.
- However, in the mainframe field we see customers trying to bridge the skills shortage, and the fact that their main staff is approaching retirement age, by outsourcing the platform and transferring all their technical staff to the outsourcer. This is why many of them turn to us for assistance in “looking over the shoulder” of their mainframe outsourcer.
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Cost reduction and cost transparency remain key drivers for outsourcing
- After the initial savings are harvested and the “honeymoon period” is over, customers should ensure that they are in a position to continuously optimize their mainframe and server costs. This goes all the way back to the contract negotiations and the billing models that both should allow for optimization, daily follow up on cost and a relentless effort in mainframe optimization and server/cloud rightsizing. This is the topic in some of our other blogs and posts which can be found either on our website, or on our Linkedin site here and here.
- Our ITBI solution helps customers not only understand what they are paying for, but also enables them to explain to their business units “who uses what, when and at what cost”, as well as how to optimize their application development and business processes to lower the outsourced IT operational costs.
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Approximately half of the customers are satisfied with their outsourcer, 30% neutral and 20% dissatisfied. Proactivity, Continuous service improvement and Innovation are some of the key areas for outsources to improve.
- Outsourcers should ensure customer satisfaction and -retention via transparency, self-service and services that adds value to their clients assisting them in driving innovation. Read about this in my colleague’s Nils Kierkegaard’s blog here.
At SMT Data, we work with both outsourcers and customers with outsourced infrastructure. And our view is, that transparency is the key to ensure a productive and positive partnership between Outsourcer and Client.
Outsourcers should dare to “open up the books” and deliver services to assist customers continuously running in a fully optimized environment. It might impact the short-term capacity-based revenue – but both the Outsourcer and the Client will win in a scenario where contracts are extended, and the business relationship is regarded as a true partnership.
