I was reading an article in a CMP magazine.

MSP's (Managed Service Providers) being the future of web hosting.

It states by 2005 90% of customers will want a more managed solution.

Any thoughts.

Joe

I think that 90% is a really high percentage. I am sure there will be more companies using managed server services, but there will still be many organizations that will just need to be able to put some information on the Internet. Software packages like Microsoft FrontPage are very easy for anyone to use and will probably get easier as newer versions are released. I do not think that many companies will want to spend extra money to have a simple site managed when they can do it easily themselves.

Best regards,
Frank Rietta

Well it was just a article. It was quite interesting though.

Here is a link to that article:

http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2698285,00.html

Take a glance and let me know.

Joe

I think anyone who uses Front Page is cheating themselves out of learning what HTML is all about, lets face it, you cant really build the best looking sites with Front Page, from what I remember Front Page used to delete my java scripts and rearrange all my code, plus with those extensions I couldnt do a normal FTP without messing everything up, I really dont see how or why companies of the future would want to use Front Page..

I am glad Front Page has come up, but can we try to stay on track with the post.

Joe

I for one, like to my manage things myself.

You know, it's like a long lasting ideologic war between PC and thin-client architectures.. Both are useful, and both will live in parallel, i think. Personally i just hate FrontPage for the reasons, described by ee-o ( ;) ), just like i hate thin clients and hardly-upgradable brandnames.. I'm not a fanatic of command-line interface, though, but i prefer to write my code by hands ;)
The same story with MSPs.. People just trying to find their piece of money pie, and that's not bad, the more good choices we'll have, the better it would be.

Oh, just forgot to say thanx for the article! ;)

Joe,

I don't see any mention of the 90% figure in that article, but I am highly skeptical of that number, and here is why:

99% of all businesses in the United States are classified as small businesses (less than 500 employees).

90% of all businesses have less than 25 employees.

The majority of these businesses are not going to see a need for services from a company like SiteSmith. They are going to want a simple site, perhaps a small database, etc.

Now if you were to ask me if 90% of the customers in the Exodus/Sprint/UUNET/Level 3 data centers will need managed services of some sort by 2005 I would agree with that. Especially considering how loosely the term is defined in the article.

If providing offsite monitoring and offering back up services constitutes managed services, then we are already an MSP :), so I think the definition needs some refinement to be more effective.

In the magazine article there is a chart, that shows how people are going away from basic colocation:

90% is colocation with managed services, and fully managed solutions.

Thats where I got the number from.

I did print out the article from the website, and it is true, there is no mention of it.

Joe