5 Reasons Managed Services are the Future of Integration

In the broadest sense, the term managed services describes the management of a business function by a third party. Examples of commonly consumed managed services include building maintenance, payroll, and customer service to name a few. The strategy behind managed services is simple: increase efficiency and decrease cost by offloading work that is not central to an organization’s mission to a specialized provider.

This strategy has particular resonance in the IT industry, with companies increasingly relying on outside providers for a large variety of technology services ranging from email hosting to data storage to network monitoring. In fact, 49% of CIOs and other managers recently surveyed indicated their companies’ IT functions are either mostly or partially outsourced.

Integration, however, due to a long legacy of do-it-yourself integration models such as ESB and, more recently, iPaaS, is rarely part of the managed services equation. But this is changing—and with good reason.