One of the focus areas for Total Product Marketing is the Cloud/ Hosting market. Today, we want to look at the complex world of Managed Hosting.
Managed hosting providers come in all shapes and sizes. Some hosters focus on a specific geography, specialize in a certain verticals or concentrate on a specific infrastructure type like cloud. There are hosters that primarily serve SMBs and others that target the enterprise. Some hosters offer only a few types of infrastructure services and are equipped with a narrower range of technical capabilities. Others position as full-service shops and can take on almost any kind of engagement.
While there are some very capable providers few if any managed hosters are capable of doing everything for everyone. There is just too much complexity and diversity in IT infrastructure for this to be possible. Providers inevitably zero in on certain use cases and leave the rest for competitors. The same is true from the customer’s perspective. No customer is alike and finding the right provider is about matching needs with requirements.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that the managed hosting competitive landscape is fragmented, provincial and specialized. But to the uninitiated outside observer this is not what they see. They see a young industry with unrecognizable brand names. And they see a relatively generic set of offerings that uses a lot of the same terminology.
One company that stands out for its ability to provide high touch experience, proven experience in helping companies get to the cloud is iNetU. The VP of Sales and Marketing, Dave Van Allen, speaks briefly about a key issue in Complex Managed Hosting.
Sifting through all of this can be challenging and it is very easy to see why customers have a hard time seeing how managed hosters are different. But the good news is that finding order within this complexity is a relatively simple task if you know where and what to look for. The fact is managed hosters are anything but alike. They have contrasting strengths and weaknesses and offer up drastically different value propositions. Another such factor that serves as a differentiator is “Experience”.
What do you look for in a trusted Managed Hoster?
