Survey: Multinational corporations want better communications with managed service providers

Managed service providers have room to improve on their relationships with multinational customers, a survey of multinational corporations conducted by Virtela, an MSP with an international focus. Only one in five respondents gave its MSP high marks.

Better communications with customers could go a long way toward improving those results, the survey suggests. Nearly a quarter (24%) of respondents said MSPs should have a better understanding of their requirements, 29% said MSPs could improve satisfaction through more proactive notification of problems, and 24% said MSPs should provide more timely communication of status and issues.

The results support the idea that large multinational companies have unique requirements as a result of their geographic dispersion, including operations in countries where information technology and communications options are limited, Virtela Vice President of Marketing Liza Adams told Connected Planet.

“What works in Chicago doesn’t necessarily work in Dubai,” said Adams.

The cloud has strong appeal
Because large multinational corporations often have limited IT resources, they often are very interested in moving applications and infrastructure to the service provider cloud, Adams said.
“What’s really critical is that they don’t have hands and feet in these remote locations and sometimes don’t have the capital to deploy customer premises equipment there,” said Adams.

The top IT infrastructure priority cited by survey respondents was “security & compliance” and “infrastructure monitoring & management,” both of which were cited by 13% of respondents. Next on the list were data center consolidation and application acceleration, both of which were cited by 11% of respondents.

The survey had more than 400 respondents at multinational corporations with revenues of $100 million to $1 billion.