An interesting trend we see among our customers is moving the operations of essential applications to experts outside their organization, to better realize their digital transformation goals. The concept of handing off the operational “car keys” to BMC, for example, is growing in popularity, whether it’s effectively driving a Remedy upgrade or extracting enhanced performance from BladeLogic.
In my next few blogs, I’ll share our experience with customers about why or how they are choosing a BMC Managed Services path, in hopes that it helps you explore the right approach for your organization. I also hope you’ll share your reasons for outsourcing to BMC in our Communities, where many customers and partners offer their valuable comments and suggestions.
A Matter of Cost
For many IT leaders I meet with, the ability to attract, retain and constantly develop appropriate technical skills across their teams is an on-going effort. Too many highly skilled teams are caught up in firefighting, unable to focus on driving the business forward. Daily operations interrupt the ability to leverage the most value from solutions, and can prompt high staff turnover.
Part of the strategic decision about where customers invest comes down to understanding business goals – are you trying to get a system up and running quickly? Do you have people managing specific operations who could be better suited to more strategic tasks? Hopefully you are not in the worst case scenario, with unskilled team members doing the best they can, yet causing errors and service outages.
For many who consider this line of thinking, a deciding factor in choosing BMC Managed Services is cost. Expenses and budget come up in several ways in an enterprise, as we have seen, including the below (but we also encourage your feedback in Communities based on your own experiences).
Keeping Technical Skills Current
The obvious cost is in people. As customers map out the personnel skills they will need across the next year, many quickly realize it is faster and easier to turn to BMC teams. Relying on vendor skillsets ensures they are fully qualified in your application, but also, always current on the latest and greatest feature sets. This is especially important if you are considering an upgrade, for example (see below). Hiring, training, and retaining exactly the right technical skillset can be time-consuming, tricky, and expensive – yet living with weakly qualified teams can cost even more!
Tapping into qualified vendor teams not only addresses skill gaps, but also opens the door to better future planning and roadmaps. The same people running your operations can better foresee and advise of any impact your planned changes might have in your environment. Once again, another side effect of the managed service can be reduced cost.
Placing In-House Staff “On Call” During Upgrades
In some cases, it makes more business sense to “hand the car keys” to your vendor, who can select and optimize the key features you really need from your upgrade. They can offload daily operations while improving the upgraded application’s business impact. They can also help avoid another cost that is usually hidden in what happens amidst an application upgrade – 24-hour staffing.
Instead of keeping multiple in-house teams on call and on overtime, specialized teams such as BMC Manage! technicians will handle the inevitable tuning and customizing that makes your application even more valuable. Knowing how to use alerting or how to automate ticketing based on real, live operations adds significant value. The cost of keeping your own staff on hand before, during and after an upgrade can be a heavy hit to expenses, and this is another reason we see customers asking us for managed service options.
The Cost of Moving Too Slowly
One last example I’ll point out, related to cost, is the strategic impact to your business if you do not succeed in adopting a digital technology. Sometimes, just a matter of three months can make or break competitive advantage, particularly in fast-moving industries like retail and hospitality.
If your enterprise priority is to deliver mobility, virtualization or digital capabilities to support the rest of your business to compete, what is the cost of failure?
Specialists in a managed services environment have run critical systems before. It’s far less likely they will introduce issues that slow things down, and far more likely they will drive you away from trouble spots learned from prior experiences. In an aggressive drive to win in your market, you can’t afford to rely on amateurs.
At a more tactical level, calculate how many people you will need to deliver capabilities for your business, and more importantly, how quickly you will need to deliver. Is it even possible to staff up in two quarters? Will the team be comfortable enough working together to function productively, if you do find the right talent? How much of upper management will be pulled down into tactical weeds to support the new staff increases?
It may be more strategically advantageous to choose a managed service, not to mention more cost-effective. The BMC specialized teams brought on board will not only know BMC products inside and out, but can also operate your systems quickly, with less risk.
Should unique environments or “creative” uses of the product arise, these teams have direct access to R&D and a host of qualified colleagues. I don’t mean just email access – through co-location with engineers and support staff, BMC teams knock on doors and meet anytime to keep customers up and running. It is difficult to put a price tag on teams that are both used to working together and adept in their technical skillsets.
I’ve highlighted just three aspects of how a Managed Services option might be more cost-effective than running BMC technologies on your own. How will you make your outsourcing decisions and what factors are most important? Share your thoughts and feedback in our Communities and find more related blogs.
To learn more about BMC Managed Services, visit our Web site.
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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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