During the early stages of a prospective engagement all managed service providers take stock of a clients environment by carrying out activities of due diligence. This often centres on simply counting users, desktops, laptops, servers etc plus carrying out some specific design reviews. At this early stage an assumed number of applications is detailed by the business. Digging deeper into inventory and Discovery systems the managed service provider could easily and quickly ascertain that there are 10 times the number of applications in production and that the world they are going to inherit is unmanaged.

Once the engagement is won the new managed service provider will carry out activities of housekeeping and consolidation to ensure support for their winning low bid but as soon as they realise that they are accountable for far more than the handful of applications they were advised about they have to contemplate renegotiations.

As you can imagine, we at Camwood have a natural bias towards applications but a simple philosophy that the  “business function” is the most important deliverable would be new “breath of fresh air” response to the client. It would of course mean that the application(s) that deliver these functions are naturally of secondary importance followed lastly by the underlying infrastructure of equipment that managed service providers focus on!

 With more and more clients virtualising every aspect of their IT systems the concept of counting individual items in the estate at due diligence time is becoming irrelevant and meaningless. Instead the worth of the prospective engagement is based on the quality of service that each business function receives rather than the number of users of that service.

Imagine the day when the RFP simply says “keep our business functions operating and help us out deliver our competitors”, where would you start your due diligence then? ……………………………. (apps, apps, APPS)