With the economic downturn in full nosedive-mode, companies are concerned about earnings reports, managers are worried about their budgets, and IT staffs are trying to figure out how to keep the infrastructure secure and performing well with flat or decreasing headcounts.

One bright side in IT, though, is Managed Service Providers (MSP), who say they are busier than ever. That’s not too surprising, considering IT leaders must keep their companies humming along with low capital budgets and hiring freezes. Third-party MSPs are filling that gap.

About 63% of companies use MSPs for something. One-third of those use MSPs for IP telephony management. The growth in the past four years has been steady, going from just 6% in 2005, to 14% in 2006, to 22% in 2007, and up to 33% in 2008.

MSPs are increasingly filling the gap for IP telephony systems, ranging from full management to selected pieces, such as Tier 1 support, on-site support, or maintenance and upgrades. Several types of companies offer managed VoIP services—carriers, systems integrators, outsourcers, vendor/manufacturers, and value-added resellers.

These providers typically use specialty IP telephony monitoring tools, such as those from Clarus, Fluke Networks, EMC, Infovista, Prognosis, and NetQoS, to monitor and manage their customers’ IP telephony products.

This trend is going to continue, not only because of the budget crunch. The virtual workplace continues to expand, creating challenges for an increasingly centralized IT staff. Consider these trends:

* 89% of companies operate a “virtual workplace,” meaning some percentage of their employees work remotely from supervisors or workgroups.
* The number of branch offices is growing by 6.8% annually.
* Only 18% of these branch locations house any sort of technical expertise.

This expanding distributed enterprise is causing demands not only on bandwidth and network, but also on the staff that must manage IT application delivery to all end users. The only way for IT staffs to scale with the growth in devices, applications, and virtual workers is to add more headcount or obtain the monitoring/management tools that provide the data for central and remote locations. Alternatively, they must rely upon third parties—and that’s where I predict we will see more growth.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.