Based on a poll of its customers, SCC has found that organisations are increasingly turning to hosted applications for rapid access to best-of-breed technologies while also trying to reduce capital expenditure.
Nick Martin, general manager of solution architecture, SCC, said, “While the economic downturn is putting pressure on IT departments to reduce operating costs, senior management still want the latest technologies. As a consequence, we have seen a sharp rise in demand for hosted applications, cloud computing solutions and technology as a service (TaaS).
“With no up-front capital expenditure and the hassle and risk of management taken away, particularly where ageing legacy systems present complex environments, companies are increasingly looking for risk-free alternatives to expensive in-house systems.”
By packaging technologies and delivering them to customers as a service, a highly resilient and secure system can be provisioned rapidly for a predictable and fixed price, reducing operating costs by more than 20 per cent.
Advocates of hosted applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, say that they are significantly cheaper to buy as managed services when compared with the costs involved in setting up a dedicated in-house system.
