IBM has announced a broad set of global initiatives to better position clients to take advantage of cloud opportunities. This effort is aimed at further expanding IBM’s cloud ecosystem, enabling organizations to develop solutions and services on IBM SmartCloud and PureSystems, built on open standards. As more clients embrace cloud computing, they are looking to local technology providers known as Managed Service Providers (MSP) to help them quickly develop cloud based services in a more simplistic, secure and economical way.
Managed service providers deliver a defined set of technology solutions or services to clients with a pay-as-you-go model. MSPs are largely leveraged by customers which want to take advantage of cloud technologies but lack the internal IT skills, resources and time. For example, smaller hospitals are still challenged with adopting electronic medical records. Many healthcare providers are turning to the MSP model, where an MSP can quickly help the small healthcare provider to build and manage a cloud service to process patient data and make that information available securely in the cloud, freeing up the healthcare provider to focus more on the patient.