IBM have announced that more businesses than ever can now take advantage of their Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (RMIS) which they claim are more standardised and modular than they were before and most importantly, more affordable, particularly for SMEs.
IBM class an SME (a small to medium sized enterprise) as one that has 1000 or less members of staff.
This is bound to come as welcome news for smaller businesses who traditionally might have thought they couldn’t afford to take advantage of RMIS in the way that larger companies have. Also let’s face it; with the current economy in a bit of a mess, they might even have had to cut back on in-house IT salaries leaving their business IT infrastructure at risk.
Andy Rowarth, UK director of IB Global Technology Services said “We can help take the operational workload off the customer, so they can re-allocate resources in their IT department to dealing with other challenges”.
Basically smaller companies can outsource some or even all of their IT operations almost immediately; leaving them free to get on with actually running their business and they could save money at the same time.
Mike Dorosh, Global Services Manager for IBM, claims that businesses who choose to outsource their IT management to IBM can make savings of around 20% compared to doing it themselves in-house, with some companies maybe seeing us much as a 50% savings.
Entry level starting prices range from £50,000 to £100,000 for three years and companies can choose from Bronze, Silver and Gold packages which range from basic monitoring and notification services right through to complete running of their IT services with major involvement from IBM.
The service is also pretty flexible as customers will be able to mix and match packages for different servers depending on their IT needs.
That’s not all though; IBM will also be able to offer skills in other areas such as change management and asset management, again something that smaller businesses might not have the resources or the skills to do themselves.
According to Dorosh, “in five years’ time, most firms will be looking to get services off site completely to the cloud. In a way, this is about preparing customers for this”.
Well if you get the skills you need and can offload the hassle and it’s cheaper, why not?
