Most companies have treated Information Technology services as ‘overhead’: a necessary cost of doing business, but — as with Human Resources, Finance, or Facilities — not a function that was directly integral to revenue generation. The offshore outsourcing of the 1990s evolved into the “Managed Service Providers” of today, but the message was always the same: IT was a commodity where the undifferentiated services could be performed by anyone.
Now don’t get us wrong, we are not saying the cookie-cutter philosophy is entirely incorrect. There are many services that are indeed ‘commodities’, basic network and compute infrastructures can be efficiently managed by a skilled Help Desk staff from nearly anywhere, and Microsoft has certainly capitalized on the self-cannibalizing idea that not every corporation needs to run their own Exchange mail server when Software-as-a-Service Exchange Online can be implemented instead.
However, we have also been fortunate to work with companies that realize IT can still be an area that allows a business to differentiate itself from competitors. Managed services can only go so far, and there are often situations beyond their ken. A balancing of MSP economy-of-scale coupled with a healthy dose of problem-solving expertise from seasoned IT professionals — ones who will not view your business processes with a lens of conformance, but rather as an opportunity for unique differentiation — can allow your staff and operations to stand head-and-shoulders above the competition.
WildCard Computing Group is an Information Technology consulting firm that can be your rational and unbiased technology partner in business-optimized problem solving. With a tremendous breadth of expertise in all manner of hardware, software, and services, we have decades of experience in delivering IT solutions at any scale, from SMB to enterprise class.