Managed Service Providers are one of the types of businesses that are seeing benefits from the economic situation. Now, about 63% of businesses use some third-party service to help serve branch locations.

In large part, this is because companies are moving costs from headcount or personnel to consulting in the hopes of saving IT budget. Further, the IT leaders expect to see further savings if the company downsizes in areas other than IT.

Utility-based pricing that MSPs typically charge drives this benefit: Rather than paying $80,000 for a full-time IT support person, regardless of whether there are 500 or 800 employees, they pay a per-employee (or per-desktop, or per-phone) rate that changes as the number of employees change.

That’s the conventional wisdom these days for those whose main concern is the economy.

But for those who have a more holistic view of IT and its ability to resolve business problems, grow revenue, and make employees more productive, there are different reasons to secure an MSP relationship.

First, IT leaders want to offload ‘mundane’ tasks to third parties, allowing their increasingly limited IT staff to focus on business-critical or strategic initiatives. (Think integrating enterprise applications with IP telephony.)

Second, they leverage their MSP relationship to help train their own IT staff members. Though this is a less-common reason to use MSPs, I have talked to more than one MSP that has complained about investing in a relationship - say, to manage the distributed VoIP system, only to have the company disengage once their internal staff was appropriately trained.

Finally, MSPs can offer new ideas and guidance on how to leverage new technologies. After all, they work with numerous companies and have unique perspective as to how others are leveraging the latest and greatest technologies.

Why are you using MSPs? Write to me.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.