2011 Top IT Infrastructure Priorities and MSP Improvements

Executive Summary

With over 400 IT-professional respondents, 300 of which are key decision makers and influencers, from midmarket multinational companies (MNC), Virtela's 2011 Top IT Infrastructure Priorities and Managed Service Provider (MSP) Improvements survey revealed the following:

• MNCs rate MSPs well but there's room for improvement. Companies are generally satisfied with MSPs with 19% giving them an "excellent" rating and 71% awarding "good" marks. This shows continued and growing confidence in service providers based on results of Virtela's previous years' MSP satisfaction surveys. However, there is room for improvement.
• MSPs need to understand the unique needs of MNCs and tailor solutions. The survey results reinforce that the needs and challenges of MNCs are unique and often more complex with operations spanning multiple countries. As a result, these companies want service providers to have a better understanding of their needs and deliver more flexible and personalized services.
• MNCs want more timely and responsive support. Given the MNCs' reliance on MSPs to design, implement, manage and provide on-site support for their global IT infrastructure, they want more timely communications of status, proactive notification of problems and improved response time.
• More value for the price top the list of improvements. These companies have the unique challenge of making remote users around the world just as productive as those employees at the main offices or headquarters. They need to provide a variety of services while controlling costs. These are key reasons why cloud solutions rank high in this year's survey, allowing MNCs to turn on multiple services on an as-needed basis without upfront investment in hardware.

Executive Summary Continued

• Security, infrastructure management, and data center consolidation top the charts. Security and compliance are most important to Financial Services companies. While Manufacturing cited infrastructure management as the top priority. All industries prioritized data center consolidations, cloud solutions and application acceleration.

Virtela conducted a webinar with Forrester Research addressing these survey results, as well as the trends driving the top priorities. Click here to access the on-demand webinar.

Given the unique needs and challenges of MNCs, the requirements for global managed services are different and often more stringent than domestic-only managed services. It requires MSPs to have an intense focus, deep experience, expertise in global partnerships and a proven track record of successfully serving multinational companies.

Virtela has a business model and infrastructure designed and built from the ground up to meet the needs of companies with global presence, with a maniacal commitment to exceptional customer support. That's why the fastest growing multinational companies like Honeywell, Paramount, IBM, Sony, Allstate, Hanes Brands, Cadbury, Inteva, Shaklee, Kodak, P&G and many more trust Virtela for their global network, security and cloud needs.

Introduction

Virtela built a successful business by providing global managed network, security and cloud services to midmarket and Fortune 500 multinational companies around that world. To provide personalized services and support globally, it is a must for Virtela to stay on top of the changing IT environment and deeply understand the business of MNC on an ongoing basis. Although we talk with many IT leaders at MNCs daily, this annual survey allows us to validate and gain new insights on what's most important to these companies. Their top concerns are our top priorities, not just in our service roadmap but also in overall customer support.

Virtela also understands the importance IT leaders place on sharing and learning from each other's experience and best practices to determine what works and what doesn't work, particularly in a global setting. Hence, it's important for Virtela to conduct the survey and share the results to contribute to this sharing and learning process among MNCs.

Late in 2010 and early 2011, Virtela conducted a survey among IT professionals at midmarket multinational companies, covering the following topics:

• Top IT infrastructure priorities
• Overall satisfaction with their MSP
• Where and how MSPs can improve in these areas: services and solutions offering;
• installation, implementation and service delivery; maintenance and management; billing and pricing

Respondent Profile

This successful survey program garnered over 400 survey responses. 300 of the 400 IT-professional respondents are key decision makers and influencers at MNCs.

Figure 1 represents the distribution of respondents by vertical with Manufacturing, Services and Financial Services as the top three verticals represented. The Services category includes professional services companies, consulting firms, as well as legal, health, engineering, accounting, education, social and business services companies.

Figure 1. Vertical Industry Distribution of Survey Respondents

Top IT Infrastructure Priorities

The top IT infrastructure priorities for MNCs are shown in Figure 2 below and the results are segmented for the top verticals in Figure 3.

Figure 2. 2011 Top IT Infrastructure Priorities

Priorities by Top Verticals

Figure 3. 2011 Top IT Infrastructure Priorities for Manufacturing, Services and Financial Services

A Look at the Top IT Priorities

Here are a few key observations:

• Infrastructure monitoring and management are more important to MNCs. MNCs rank infrastructure monitoring and management higher on their list of IT top priorities compared with general industry responses. In Virtela's experience, this is mainly because of the complex, multi-vendor and highly distributed nature of multinational deployments as well as the lack of remote on-site resources.
• Make applications run faster around the world. Faster application performance has become one of the top priorities with companies expanding their businesses overseas. With distance, latency, larger file transfers such as graphics-intensive engineering designs, more interactive and time-sensitive applications, and lower bandwidth at remote locations, IT managers face the daunting task for making these remote employees as efficient as possible without breaking the bank.
• Key priorities are similar across verticals except security is much more important in Financial Services. In general, security and compliance, infrastructure monitoring and management, data center consolidation, application acceleration and cloud solutions all top the chart across the verticals. However, not surprising, security and compliance is the top concern by nearly 25% of the Financial Services respondents. This has long been a top issue in this industry. And the Manufacturing respondents prioritized infrastructure monitoring and management the highest.

A Look at the Top IT Priorities Continued

• Cloud solutions continue to climb in the rankings. More MNCs are looking for ways to serve their remote locations around the world more cost-effectively. These smaller locations often do not have the on-site IT resources nor the budget allocated for CPE-based solutions. So to make employees at these locations as efficient and productive as those in headquarters, companies are now turning to cloud solutions to address their remote needs. Some of the cloud-based services, beyond storage and compute, being evaluated and deployed include the following:
  • Security services such as cloud-based firewall, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), web filtering, Security Event and Information Management (SIEM), and malware services.
  • Networking services such as cloud-based Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Network (SSL VPN) and application acceleration for applications hosted in the enterprise, private clouds and public clouds (i.e., Amazon EC2, IBM Cloudburst and Rackspace cloud)
  • Mobility services like cloud-based mobile device management
  • Cloud-based infrastructure monitoring and management of LAN/WAN, Internet telephony, and security devices

Overall MSP Satisfaction

With 9 out of 10 IT decision makers and influencers giving MSPs at least a "good" rating, see Figure 4, this bodes well for MSPs.

However, MSPs should not sit confidently and comfortably because MNCs cited several areas for improvement which are covered in the next sections.

Figure 4. Overall MNC Satisfaction with MSPs

Understanding Needs and Personalized Services

The key takeaway here is that MNCs want MSPs to better understand their unique requirements and to have the flexibility to meet their different needs.

With MNCs, off-the-shelf services often don't work. What works in New York City won't necessarily work in New Delhi. Solutions often need to be customized, even on a location-by-location basis. Integration and management of multi-vendor solutions are common and MSPs need to operate swiftly in this kind of environment, simplifying this complexity for MNCs. This environment requires an MSP with deep experience with global, multi-vendor deployments with a do-what-it-take approach to customer solutions. Figure 5 clearly reflects the importance of these key MSP attributes to MNCs.

These are also the key foundational elements of Virtela's business model. We have a business model that's carrier, vendor and technology agnostic to specifically meet the needs of midmarket and Fortune 500 multinational companies. It allows us to freely and truly personalize customer solutions - integrating the best carrier and vendor partners to meet MNCs specific requirements.

"We evaluated all the major global service providers and Virtela met our exhaustive requirements. Virtela uniquely gives us a single face for all network implementation and management, with a flexible broadband network solution that delivers greater reach, performance and savings."

Mike Reynolds, Wide Area Network Manager

Understanding Needs and Personalized Services Continued

Figure 5. Service and Solution Offering Improvement Areas

Timeliness and Responsiveness

Based on the survey results, timeliness and responsiveness are key factors that determine overall satisfaction with MSPs.

In some situations, MNCs are wholly reliant on the MSP to manage their remote infrastructure. The MSP becomes the company's eyes and ears, as well as hands and feet on-site for their global implementation. Without timely communications and fast response, no news can be unsettling and alarming for MNCs. These are the reason why improvements in these areas are critically important, as shown in Figures 6 and 7.

Installation, Implementation, and Service Delivery Improvement Areas

Figure 6. Installation, Implementation, and Service Delivery Improvement Areas

Service Monitoring and Management Improvement Areas

Figure 7. Service Monitoring and Management Improvement Areas

Virtela's Responsiveness

At Virtela, we are proud of the success our customers have achieved as a result of our timely communications and fast response.

"Virtela's customer service has far exceeded our expectations. Even though it wasn't their responsibility, Virtela stepped in so our users weren't left stranded. Moreover, the Virtela team consistently communicates with us. With most providers, you don't hear from them after the network is brought up."

Martin Ronquillo, Network Systems Manager

"It sounds ludicrous, but before Virtela, network downtime was really impacting our business. Now with Virtela, we're at 99.99 % network availability. If there's a problem with the network somewhere, the users are not aware, and we usually find out because Virtela sends us a notification."

Bob Andreini, Global Director of IS/IT

Virtela maintains an impressive 99% rate for opening trouble tickets proactively; outperforms the 4-hour mean time to restore (MTTR) guarantee with a 1.74-hour average; and boast a 12-second average speed to answer time. Virtela actively informs customers when problems occur. In many situations, we're able to predict and pre-empt issues using our predictive analytics technology called VirtelaPredict. And because of Virtela's fault-tolerant, multi-carrier backbone, packets get re-routed automatically without impacting service.

More Value for the Price

As shown in Figure 8, MNCs want MSPs to deliver more value for the price. Although this may sound trite, many of the individual survey responses, and the nature of multinational businesses, point to the sincerity of this response. MNCs desire true partners, not just vendors, that are truly invested in the success of their business.

Figure 8. Pricing and Billing Improvement Areas.

More Value for the Price Continued

More value for the price doesn't necessarily mean lower price. To these MNCs, it can reflect the need to make their remote users as productive as their workers at headquarters without significant investment in capital and resources. It can also indicate their desire for a flexible and personalized, multi-vendor solution with the best support and management of multiple vendors. It can signify their desire to turn services on and off as needed at each location and only paying for what they need. Or simply, it can mean finding a partner that will go the extra mile for them - without nickel and diming.

Figure 8 also shows the importance of timely delivery of price quotes and billing accuracy. MNCs face these challenges more often than domestic-only companies due to the multi-vendor nature of most implementations. Virtela is proud to offer a 100% billing accuracy SLA. If there are any billing errors, those errors will be corrected within the next billing cycle.

Our work with Lam Research, demonstrates how Virtela and Virtela ESC provide more value for the price in the areas of network design, security, network performance, and operational process.

In addition to Virtela's commitment and track record in providing personalized services, exceptional support, and eliminating the challenges of managing multiple vendors, our customers get a lot of value from managed cloud-based services enabled by Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC). Some of these services include remote access using SSL VPN, security, SIEM, proactive IT infrastructure monitoring and management, and application acceleration. Try our interactive model and see how much faster your applications can run -- anywhere in the world!

Voice of the Customer

At Virtela, the voice of the customer is very important to us. It's not enough that we go above and beyond for our customers; they must experience the difference and the value.

Listen to one of our customers - Mark Lawler, VP of IT for Quark. Quark has been a leader in publishing for nearly 30 years, providing dynamic publishing solutions for customers around the world. More than three million people use the company's flagship product, QuarkXPress. Virtela is currently providing Quark with managed services in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Conclusion

In 2011, MNCs will focus their efforts and resources on Security & Compliance, Infrastructure Monitoring & Management, Data Center Consolidation, Application Acceleration and Cloud Solutions. Which makes sense, given their challenge to maintain and expand the company's global presence. An IT manager at a MNC must make the world as small as possible while carefully controlling capital investments and expenses. They must reduce the obstacles common to users in a global environment, make them feel like they're all working in the same building, and ensure they are able to work as efficiently as possible.

Although MNCs are generally satisfied with the services and support they get from MSP, the survey results clearly show that MSPs have room to improve and there are several must-do's that MNCs crave. Their top picks are:

• Better understand unique needs and develop flexible and personalized services
• More timely communications of status and improve response time
• More value for the price

Given the unique needs and challenges of MNCs, the requirements for global managed services are different and often more stringent than domestic-only managed services. It requires MSPs to have an intense focus, expertise in global partnerships and a proven track record of successfully serving multinational companies. Virtela has a business model and infrastructure designed to meet the needs of multinational companies and a commitment to providing exceptional customer support. That's why the fastest growing multinational companies trust Virtela for their global network, security and cloud needs.

About Virtela

Virtela is the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company. Virtela offers an award-winning suite of services - including managed networks, security, application acceleration and proactive infrastructure management - to mid-market and Fortune 500 customers around the world. Virtela offers unparalleled geographic reach to more than 190 countries through its partnerships with more than 500 carriers.

Virtela is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with globally distributed Network Operations Centers in the U.S., India and the Philippines. For more information, please call +1 (720) 475-4000 or visit www.virtela.net.