IBM Technology Support Services (TSS) transforms to satisfy key trends in the support services marketplace.
Businesses in today’s world need technical support and services to take full advantage of their current and future IT environment — across networks, data centers, the cloud and edge computing — while keeping their existing infrastructure up and running. They need smart support to help predict and prevent unplanned disruption and technical services that accelerate how businesses take advantage of the opportunity hybrid cloud presents.
Many businesses are developing more sophisticated, dynamic architectures that include multiple vendors, on- and off-premises systems, complex networks, commercial and community open-source software and cybersecurity requirements. These architectures need to be designed and planned to excel, but they also must be executed flawlessly and optimized continuously with scarce skilled resources.
The 2022 IDC MarketScape report on support services is timely. I believe this report affirms the strategic changes IBM Technology Support Services (TSS) has been making to provide the support and services our clients need on their journey to hybrid cloud.
The IDC MarketScape report summary
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Support Services 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US48896919, March 2022), is an in-depth analysis and evaluation of 11 of the worldwide support services providers. To be considered in this report, the providers were required to demonstrate the ability to maintain either servers, storage or networking assets in a data center environment and have a minimum annual support revenue of $500 million.
The report identifies trends in the marketplace, factors for success for suppliers and benefits of leveraging support services. Furthermore, the report provides advice for enterprises looking to procure support services.
IBM is proud to be named a Leader in this report. Our global IBM Technology Support Services (TSS) offer turnkey support and technical services for IBM Systems products and other leading vendor systems and software, delivered by experts offering more than 230 different external technical certifications. The report provides a deeper dive into the strengths of IBM TSS and how it can benefit clients.
The IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles.
Why use support services?
The report shares the top benefits of using support services and the services most frequently used by clients. These benefits correspond with many of the comments our clients have shared about why what we do is so critical to their business. While this report references hardware, we’re seeing similar benefits on the software side, with support for commercial and community open source increasing. Our portfolio of software support and services offerings is continuously expanding to new third-party vendors.
Key success factors for support services
Enterprises that were interviewed identified several key factors for success. The Vendor Summary Profile for IBM does a great job of covering many of the changes we already made. So, let’s walk through a couple of the key success factors through the lens of our most recent IBM TSS transformation.
The IDC MarketScape report recommends “looking for vendors that invest in deepening a relationship and not just selling systems.” This is what we do at IBM, and we are striving every day to be the best partner to our clients. Now that Technology Support Services (TSS) is part of the IBM Systems family, we’ve aligned our support and technical infrastructure services into a single organization with one face to our clients, end-to-end. This enables us to have more powerful conversations with our clients about a holistic infrastructure strategy throughout the product lifecycle. This also responds to the growing need for professional services that the IDC MarketScape mentions.
Developing proactive methodologies is another key success factor, which is a particular focus for IBM. Our support contracts include IBM Support Insights, a security-rich cloud-based service that provides a holistic view of clients’ hybrid IT infrastructure and can help clients to improve IT uptime. By continually monitoring hybrid IT assets, analytics-driven insights provide asset management, lifecycle management, support trends and preventive maintenance recommendations with automated notifications to mitigate risks and exposures. In fact, we just announced IBM Support Insights v2.0. With AIOps baked into our offerings from the system through to the product lifecycle, being proactive can be a way of life.
Technical services have been historically siloed from support services and client success, which makes it difficult to help our clients progress. With the precious insights we gain from supporting the most mundane to the most mission-critical situations, we can change that. Bringing together support and services can help our clients efficiently manage their time spent supporting IT infrastructure (hardware and software) and enhance their time spent extracting value out of their IT infrastructure across the solution lifecycle. By leveraging insights built into our products and support systems, IBM is positioned to work with our clients to bring technical services at exactly the right time. As the insights deepen around the product lifecycle, we can help clients identify planning gaps, security vulnerabilities, configuration issues and even skills gaps for which IBM can bring technical services to assist. The more we think and act holistically around the root cause of micro and macro challenges, the more we can treat the real problems versus just treating the symptoms.
Learn more
To learn more about support services, start by reading IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Support Services 2022 Vendor Assessment. Then dive into the breadth of the IBM Technology Support Services (TSS) portfolio of IT support and technical services, and request an appointment to see how IBM TSS can help you build, support and optimize the foundation for today’s hybrid cloud and enterprise IT data centers, with the right support and services to fit your technology needs.
[1] The Total Economic Impact™ Of IBM Hybrid IT Support, Forrester Consulting, January 2021, commissioned by IBM.