IBM Turns IT Services into an Online Product

Top Managed Service Provider Trends and Challenges

Looking to turn the delivery of IT services into more of a turnkey proposition, IBM today announced that it will make available a series of services that customers can simply invoke online without having to ever meet or have any IBM services personnel on site.

Ramki Desiraju, global lead account partner and vice president for IBM Global Business Services, says it’s become apparent that for a number of services with similar attributes, a large enough base of customers needs them that it now makes sense to make them available online.

The IBM Global Business Services Online include IBM Social Media Analytics and Customer Insights, IBM Technical Healthcheck for SAP Applications, an IBM Continuous Delivery Maturity Evaluation, and IBM Mobile Applications Migration to Worklight offering.

Desiraju says the services themselves can be paid for using either a credit card or via a traditional purchase order process. IBM, says Desiraju, plans to extend this online service capability into other classes of repeatable services that don’t require IBM to send its employees on to the customer site to perform.

In effect, IBM is trying to pioneer the arrival of “click to buy” IT services in a way that decreases the time to actual delivery and completion of those services by essentially productizing the service. Instead of weeks being wasted hashing out the terms of a service that IBM has already delivered a thousand times before, customers can now opt to invoke that service on demand in a way that enables the work associated with delivering that service to begin remotely.

Some customers may obviously prefer higher forms of touch when it comes to IT services. But in a world where a large percentage of IT services are now fairly routine engagements, the time has clearly come to turn many of those services into products that can be purchased online like any other.