We have all been talking about Microsoft’s software plus services play. Hosted exchange, hosted sharepoint, hosted collaboration - all of these make sense as an extension of Microsoft into a managed services / hosted services model.
What is a bit of a surprise is to find Microsoft studying the profile of managed service providers and customers. This to me indicates that they are looking to a play more along the lines of Dell in offering full managed services to small businesses directly and through the channel.
It feel like they are looking at repackaging their tools, or acquire the tools like Dell did, to provide monitoring, maintenance, and issue resolution as a service, sounds like managed services to me.
If you don’t believe me take a look at the questionnaire below that comes from one of their program managers in their research devision.
You tell me what you think their intentions are after reading the questions.
JC
Survey:
1. Do you work full-time as a consultant for other companies?
2. Do you regularly use MSDN or TechNet online?
3. (optional) Do you administer or use SharePoint at your work? If so which one?
4. How many employees in your organization world-wide (at all locations)?
5. How many PC’s are in your organization world-wide?
6. How many servers are in the organization?
7. Which server operating systems are deployed in your organization’s production environment?
8. Role: If you had to choose, which one of the following descriptions best describes your primary role (most important tasks that require significant time)?
* Technician: troubleshoots issues, provides end-user support, manages computer, or “works tickets”
* Escalation engineer: troubleshoots only the more complex customer problems
* Business Decision Maker: runs the business, sets prices, decides which services to offer
9. How many administrators are there at your company?
10. Role: If you had to choose only one, which one of the following descriptions best describes your primary role (most important tasks that require significant time)?
* IT Support: including routine server maintenance tasks and basic troubleshooting or supporting end-users
* IT Operations: including daily server, network, or desktop management and monitoring; intermediate troubleshooting
* IT Engineering: including planning and implementation of technology; complex troubleshooting
* Organization IT Decision Maker: Significant responsibility for IT budget and decisions, but limited server administration responsibilities
* Technical IT Decision Maker: Significant expertise and responsibility for technical decisions but limited responsibility for IT budget
11. Do you manage or work regularly with any of the following technologies or products?
a. SMS, System Center Configuration Manager or other patch and software management programs (If yes which ones?)
b. PowerShell
c. SharePoint (Work with, manage server, do development?)
d. Scripting or code development/editing
e. Active Directory Users and Computers
12. Have you ever or do you now work at Microsoft in any capacity?
13. Does your company provide outsourced IT services? If yes, which of the following services does your company provide:
- Reactive troubleshooting (helpdesk, end-user support)
- Proactive monitoring of customer’s computers
- Backing up customer’s data
- Periodic maintenance checks of customer’s severs
- Other specify
14. How many computers (PC’s, notebooks and servers) does your typical customer have?
15. Do you know anyone who could be interested in participating in this study?
16. Do your customers pay on a per-incident basis or on a subscription basis?
17. Do all of your customers pay on a per-incident basis or are there some who pay per incident and some who pay a subscription?
