Managed service providers exist to help businesses. Depending on the MSP, a client organization can expect a close, consultative experience in designing and implementing cloud and infrastructure support. However, is there a limit for what managed services should cover?
When speaking of what the client has to do versus what the MSP is responsible for and what they can do to go above and beyond that represents a line of delineation between managed infrastructure services and managed application services.
From the MSP perspective, guarantees for how far up the stack they go is really code for the degree of managed infrastructure rather than managed application support a client can expect.
When we speak about going up the stack, every infrastructure provider is a managed provider to some extent. Some companies will always go a lot further than other providers. What determines that extent relates to the client. There are clients who don’t want to deal with the infrastructure. There are also businesses that don’t want to deal with technology. The latter group generally has a vision they want to bring to market but don’t want to be encumbered of having to create the things that make the vision work.