Oct 1, 2008 : Hosted Solutions Grow In Next 5 Years

📅 October 1, 2008 - The number of IT functions outsourced to hosting, SaaS or cloud service providers will balloon over the next five years according to nearly 70 percent of respondents to a survey of Rackspace (rackspace.com 👉 Total Reviews: 16
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Managed web hosting and IT services firm Rackspace announced the results of its survey Wednesday, showing overall acceptace of hosted services among its clients and the positive growth of hosted services over the next five years. Nearly half of customer respondents said they expect their spending on hosted services to increase. Currently, 47 percent spend 0 to 20 percent of their IT budget on hosted services, while 30 percent spend 30 to 50 percent.

More than 40 percent of customers also responded that outsourcing IT functions to a hosting provider saved them 30 to 50 percent of their time. Furthermore, almost three-fourths of customers said they can spend at least 25 percent more time on new projects because of outsourcing.

However, the survey found that customers still do not trust hosted solutions when it comes to money. An astounding 46.5 percent of respondents said they were hesitant to host their accounting and finance operations externally. Customers also preferred to keep Payroll and billing in-house. They filled out the second and third places respectively as the top sectors that are most unlikely to become hosted.

"Rackspace is changing the way companies are buying IT services," Rackspace chief technology officer John Engates said in a statement. "Two thirds of the survey respondents use a services provider to host one or more of their SaaS applications today and the data indicates that demand is likely to increase. To meet this demand, Rackspace intends to continue to build out its portfolio of hosted IT services, which currently includes email and cloud solutions, and to back them all with our award-winning Fanatical Support."

Results of the survey must, however, be taken in context, considering that the responses are from Rackspace customers who have already adopted managed hosting. Also, the email survey was sent to about 1,600 US-based customers with only seven percent of those responding, making the number of respondants only a little over 100.