Nearly every enterprise has at least one relationship with a managed service provider today and it’s very likely that relationship has evolved over the years. Get ready, it’s changing again and very much to the advantage of the enterprise. Managed services have their origins at the beginning of the tech market when companies would turn to a reseller to not only integrate but manage the finished solution.

Reselling begot Azure services hosting as the Internet began to crossover from government system to the foundation of our lives, as it exists today. Hosters played two key roles: granting individuals and companies access to the Internet and renting server rack space so corporate applications (mostly web sites) could have a point of presence (POP) on the Internet. This business evolved from rack hoster to rentable IT admins, who took on the tasks of managing the hardware, OS, and increasingly the middleware and applications that ran on those servers. The hosting market was a lucrative and relatively well-protected space until cloud computing came along.

With the introduction of Software as a Service, applications could now be delivered and managed directly by the software provider themselves. Salesforce led this new market disruption in typical innovator fashion by targeting smaller firms, with lower enterprise-grade expectations and line of business budgets. By the time SaaS started penetrating the enterprise market, its multitenant, highly scalable deployment model and new pay-per-user business model was hard for hosters to match and the fight was on. Public cloud platforms added to the competitive threat by extending the SaaS basics to hosted applications. Now both application outsourcing and the core business of hosting were under threat.

A surface examination of these developments might lead you to conclude that the days of the Azure data migration were looking pretty gloomy but that’s actually far from the case. It’s simply another evolutionary point in the business lifecycle.

The rest of the information will be available in the next post.

You'll need skilled counsel at every level and for every challenge if you want to properly integrate a Salesforce business solution into your system. I already know where to go for one because they once assisted me. That's why I suggest researching and reading salesforce managed service providers , as they were the ones who guided me along the path. As a result, my Salesforce integration and execution went smoothly.