The growth and potential in the local market for the managed services industry is probably best summed up in the stratospheric growth of EOH. This group has grown enormously over the past number of years, with company director Rob Godlonton saying the number of staff in its managed services division has ballooned from around 300 to more than 2 500 in the past five years.
It's becoming more complex and the demand on IT resources is getting higher and business expectations are growing.
Rob Godlonton, director, EOH
This expansion has been due to EOH's aggressive acquisition spree as well as new contracts awarded. Godlonton says the growth was accelerated after winning key contracts with the likes of PG Glass, Barloworld, PG Bison, JD Group, Sasol and the Department of Justice.
This growth has also sparked a change in how the company is measured, with its Sasol contract, for example, combining SLAs with customer satisfaction levels.
"We could be at 100% of our SLAs and could still be at risk if our customer satisfaction is not what it should be. By the same token, we could be at 95% of our SLAs, but if the business loves the experience and the way we're operating, we're not at risk," he says.
Godlonton believes there's still significant room for growth in the market, as organisations grapple with managing their IT systems.
"It's becoming more complex and the demand on IT resources is getting higher and business expectations are growing. They just don't have the economies of scale to do it themselves."
He believes one of the biggest challenges in the coming year is going to be around mobile device management and the support of these devices.
An indication of how organisations are dealing with this is a recent agreement for EOH to own a customer's physical IT infrastructure and devices. "They said to us: 'Charge us a monthly fee per user, per service: our asset is our data'."
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