Today, businesses demand measurable results that drive economic value. As organizations embrace managed services to navigate IT complexity, reduce risks, and achieve strategic goals, we're witnessing a transition from merely ensuring uptime and service availability to delivering tangible business outcomes. The focus has shifted from 'uptime to outcomes.' 

How is managed service adoption shifting? 

According to a recent Cisco demand study, over 88% of organizations expect to increase their spending on managed services by over 10% in the next 12-18 months. And they are increasingly looking for managed services that contribute to key business initiatives. 

The top 5 ranked priorities for managed services indicate a shift in focus: accelerating innovation (85%), enhancing customer experiences (82%), optimizing supply chains (79%), achieving sustainability goals (76%), and managing risk and compliance (75%). It's no longer just about supporting IT back-office functions; it's about driving the business strategy forward and enabling a more agile organization.

Tracking the evolution of managed services

To understand this evolution and its implication for providers,let'slook at the Cisco Managed Services Maturity Continuum. 

The next phase of managed services success requires providers to shift significant elements of their practices to align with the evolved market demand for business-relevant outcomes, with product management, sales, marketing, and customer success each requiring material change. A focus on product features and device-level support that characterized many traditional project and catalog-based managed services will challenge providers to deliver the integrated experiences, KPIs, and reporting insights that customers seek, limiting access to new buying centers and delivering greater relevance. 

While point solutions can address specific needs, they often fall short in solving IT complexity and delivering the integrated, scalable, and flexible services that today's businesses require.  In contrast, platform-based approaches complemented through ecosystems promise to enable more complex outcomes, resonate with a wider buyer audience, and address more specific industry needs with added context gained from enhanced data visibility and tailored experiences.  At the same time platforms versus point products reduce provider costs to build and operate new services at scale while unlocking new revenue potential.  Sounds like a win-win in checking off key success criteria, doesn't it? 

Advanced managed services: From SOC/NOC to AI Operations

Managing risk and compliance is a top business concern that every customer is grappling with, and heightened security and compliance requirements are driving investment in managed security services. Skill shortages, an increased number of threat surfaces based on a distributed work environment, and heightened attacker sophistication (the dark side of AI) leave little choice for most organizations other than to hire professionals. 

The most advanced managed services will be delivered from a common SOC/NOC, leveraging AI Operations (AIOps) to significantly reduce the time to identify threats, resolve issues and identify root causes or threat vectors. This centralized approach not only enhances service efficiency but also ensures a more proactive, security-centric stance in managing IT environments, backed by evolved service agreements and reporting that focuses more on outcomes than availability or uptime. 

Imagine using the wide area and access networks as a distributed sensor array, gathering further context from other application delivery platforms, and gaining insights from user and endpoint devices. Support personnel would be better equipped to support the customer/user base while security experts define intelligent access policies and receive relevant alerts related to unauthorized access, helping organizations achieve compliance goals. 

Providers can achieve this today by leveraging Cisco's platforms as part of their services. AIOps-driven delivery complements real-time monitoring with predictive analytics and automated remediation, ensuring that issues are addressed before they impact the business. This results in improved customer satisfaction -check! And providers will find the operational efficiencies a helpful path to upskill operations and support teams to deliver new levels of service -check, check! 

Moving through the Maturity Continuum unlocks many levers to success along the journey. Over time, we expect to see even greater opportunities to increase customer value and partner profitability with more flexible consumption models, metered in outcome-based units of measure, and even greater automation & service levels with advances in AI-supported delivery. 

Building success with outcome-based managed services today

Cisco technology and partner managed services resources can help providers with the shift to outcome oriented services more efficiently across networking, security, collaboration, observability, and AI-ready data center technology platforms.   We're committed to working with MSPs to deliver technology that is optimized for their unique needs, supporting cross-domain architectures, increasing operational automation, and delivering open APIs and telemetry to enable differentiated services.   

Our library of resources also includes assets for partner product, marketing, service delivery, customer success, and sales teams to accelerate their time to market that have accelerated MSP service launch & optimization across the?lifecycle by as much as 50%

Moving forward, with innovation and speed

As an industry, there is a lot of ground to cover to achieve this shift.  But we're encouraged by groups like theTechnology Services Industry Association (TSIA),which annually recognizes early innovators and their industry-leading success, including for managed services practices.    

Cisco has beennamed a winner in past yearsfor managed services innovation. And we're excited to congratulate our esteemed partner, Logicalis, for achieving the Technology Services Industry AssociationTSIA award for Managed ServicesKPI innovation for 2024! 

For years, Logicalis has leveraged Cisco's world-class technologies in combination with their market-leading array of value-added services to deliver tremendous value to organizations around the globe.  And their commitment to best practices and the highest level of service assurance has been validated by their achievement multipleCisco Powered Servicesdesignations across their portfolio.  Today, Logicalis' AIOps-optimizedDigital Fabric Platformis transforming traditional service metrics to meet the changing demands of customers for business outcomes. They have refined service delivery metrics to focus on user experience, utilization, security compliance, environmental goals, and recommendations to measurably reduce carbon emissions. As a result, there are impactful real-time KPI examples that illustrate how Logicalis is driving customer efficiencies and modernizing infrastructure. For example, reported customer outcomes include reducing user frustration by 22%, cutting carbon emissions by 23%, and strengthening security posture while minimizing threat exposure by 38%.

An exciting step forward in managed service maturity and advancing customer value! Congratulations to the Logicalis team for the recognition of their industry innovation. And a big thank you for an incredible partnership! 

The future of managed services

As we look to the future, the shift from uptime to outcomes will continue to gain momentum. Cisco is committed to supporting our partners on this journey, providing innovative technology platforms, earning their preference, and recognizing & rewarding their performance along the way.  

Next week at Cisco's Partner Summit#CiscoPS24, we're excited to explore even more opportunities with the providers in attendance and to build success together. 

Let's#GoManaged!

Register for the Cisco Partner Summit Live Digital Broadcast

Learn more:

Delivering customer outcomes through managed services, Cisco and Deloitte

Cisco Partner Program Provider-led Managed Services

The 3 Ps for Partner Managed Services: Platform, Preference, and Performance

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