Industry Statistics: 2000 IT Pro Survey about using Service Providers

jeffl — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:17:00 GMT

Microsoft recently worked with MarketTools's Zoom Panel Tech to conduct a 2000 IT Pro survey on the subject of how and why they use solution providers (IT consultants, resellers, system integrators and hosted service providers).

Here are the highlights:

Over 70% of IT pros surveyed use some sort of solution provider (consultant, reseller, system integrator or hosted service provider.)

Consultants were indicated by IT decision makers as the most commonly used solution provider (57%) vs. resellers (43%), solution integrators (38%), and hosted service providers (36%)
42% of IT decision makers view solution providers as "highly" or "extremely" influential in the direction of their IT systems, versus other outside influences, such as vendors, peers, publications and analysts.
About 40% of IT decision makers say their solution providers help them save money (7, 8 or 9 out of 1-9 scale.)
"Strategic advice, guidance and overall expertise" (39%) were cited by IT decision makers as the most important value provided by solution providers, over skills such as deployment and implementation (21%) or ongoing support/maintenance (14%)
54% of IT decision makers say "Overall planning, strategy and management" by solution providers provide the greatest value versus specific technical cababilities, such as systems management (38%), storage and disaster recovery (35%), virtualization (34%), security (28%) and others.
47% of IT decision makers want their solution providers to most closely align with MSFT - by far the top vendor preference.
Versus IBM (12%), HP (10%), Vmware (9%), Symantec (2%), RedHat (2%), Other (8%)

Jeff Loucks
Available Technology

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Industry Statistics: 2000 IT Pro Survey about using Service Providers