TNS adds to managed services head count
Reseller bolsters staff after increasing turnover
Oswestry-based networking reseller TNS is hiring more staff for its managed services business after more than doubling the division's revenue in the past year.
Mike Harris, managing director of TNS, said the firm has won several new contracts for its managed service offering early this year.
The division holds a BS7799-2:2002 accreditation for managed services, a market which IDC has estimated will be worth $10.3bn worldwide by 2007.
"We won some new contracts in May and June, so we're expanding the managed network service centre," Harris said.
"We see the trend to managed services continuing, especially with Cisco's recent NetSolve buy. We grew our customer base by 300 per cent and our revenue to £2.5m. This isn't bad, bearing in mind we set up the division from scratch three years ago."
Harris added that he is slowly increasing the company's head count, and is aiming for controlled growth.
Several channel firms have begun offering managed services in the past few years. Distributor Norwood Adam, now part of networking reseller business Matrix, set up and ran a Network Operations Centre (NOC) for its resellers two years ago.
Systems integrator Omnetica opened a NOC in the US earlier this year to complement its European NOC. It also announced the ServiceOne alliance, a global services co-operative, in July.
"We've seen a growth in our managed services business. There's quite a lot going on in that space," said Alex Black, Omnetica's strategy director.
He added that many companies prefer to go to 'prime outsourcers', such as EDS and IBM, but others like to go to specialists.
"People are going towards experts in one field. There's a drift towards that model," Black said.
However, economies of scale mean smaller players have to be careful on entering the market.
"There are some big opportunities out there, but every company in this market has to be very clear about exactly what it is selling," Black added.