Data centre customers want better service delivery and more flexible contracts

A study by MigSolv, the datacentre specialist, shows that nearly two-thirds of UK businesses put better service delivery and more flexible contracts from their datacentre providers at the top of their wish-list.

The study into data centre purchasing found that once a customer had signed a contract with a provider and moved in, they rarely received the level of service they had been expecting over the term of that contract.

The top items on business wish-lists emerged in a survey conducted by MigSolv, the specialist data centre consultancy that asked firms whether they planned to renew IT-services contracts with their current providers. While 20 percent polled said they would definitely sign-up for another term, the remainder said they would consider alternatives if offered good service management and more flexible contract agreements.

The majority (80 percent) of the businesses studied said that they were on 1-3 year contracts and that contract length would affect their purchasing decision and choice of provider. 52% of respondents said that they would find the ability to purchase services on a month by month basis attractive to their business.

Alex Rabbetts, CEO MigSolv said: “UK businesses have told us what they really want from their datacentre providers; they want service delivery to improve and business terms to be less restrictive. The complexities involved in moving to a new data centre supplier have prevented some businesses from moving away from a provider, even when they have experienced less than satisfactory service. It can be difficult to move and businesses have historically been apprehensive about moving but this won’t always be the case.”
“Customers are more knowledgeable than they may have been in the past, they know that they don’t have to put up with poor service and they won’t. If the data centre provider isn’t giving them the service of the flexibility that they want, they’ll move.”

The study also found that businesses valued cost, service then flexibility as the three most important factors when considering a data centre facility. Nearly a third (29 percent) said cost or affordability remain the key issues while more than a fifth (23 percent) rated service delivery as the next highest priority. While location was less important (12 percent) than many providers claimed it to be.

Paying for power and only for what you use remains a sore point for data centre users with 78 percent saying it is a still a major issue when choosing a provider. Today, many businesses still pay for power on a fixed-cost basis. Customers are expected to estimate the power they think they will consume then charged on that basis, irrespective of usage.

Concluded Rabbetts: “The days of fixed-term contracts with a finite number of cabinets and space are still with us, but are numbered. Customers are no longer going to pay for power that they don’t use and they want more flexibility in the contracts they are offered, with cost and service the biggest drivers in purchasing decisions. There is a trend towards treating the data centre as a commodity purchase, paying only for what you use and flexing down as well as up. Data centre providers need to ‘up their game’ to deliver world-class services and only the fittest and most agile will survive.”