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Users of Managed Network Services Are Satisfied Only When Applications Are Performing Well

Posted on: Wednesday, 20 August 2008, 15:00 CDT

"Managed Network Services: Beyond Cost Savings and Uptime," a benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), found that Best-in-Class organizations are three times more likely to be satisfied with the level of managed network services they are currently using compared to Laggards. Aberdeen's research also revealed that application availability, networking cost, and application response times are the top three indicators that organizations are using when evaluating the quality of managed network services.

The report shows that Best-in-Class organizations reported an 88% average increase in application availability, a 30% average cost savings and all improved application response times for business critical applications by using managed network services.

"Aberdeen's research shows that even though organizations are able to achieve strong benefits from outsourcing network management to a third party, almost a half of these organizations are not fully satisfied with the quality of service that they are receiving," said Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen. "This is mostly due to the fact that organizational goals for network management are rapidly changing and organizations are expecting more than cost savings and network up-time, but are still struggling to adjust SLAs to help them achieve these newly expanded goals."

Ninety-four percent of Best-in-Class organizations are reporting that they are satisfied with managed network services that they are using, which is mostly due to the fact that these organizations have deployed a mix of solutions that allow them to monitor, analyze and optimize network and application performance.

Aberdeen's research reveals that Best-in-Class organizations are two times more likely to have services and tools for WAN acceleration as compared to all others. The research also shows that Best-in-Class are 65% more likely to use an integrated portal for visibility into all network services as compared to Laggards. This contributed to Best-in-Class being four times more likely to report an improvement in the level of SLA achievements as compared to Laggards.

In this report, Aberdeen used three key performance criteria to distinguish the Best-in-Class from Industry Average and Laggard organizations: application availability, Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) issues with network performance and application response times.

This report is derived from insights provided by 143 end-user organizations worldwide. Findings of this report should serve as guidelines to other end-user organizations that are looking to outsource network management to third party service providers for enabling a seamless access to corporate data while reducing operational cost and improving network up-time.

A complimentary copy of this report is made available due in part by the following underwriters: Nortel and Virtela Communications. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=4886

To access all of Aberdeen's complimentary research please visit http://research.aberdeen.com.

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen(TM) for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.

 Copyright 2008 AberdeenGroup, Inc., a Harte-Hanks Company 451 D Street, Suite 710 Boston, Massachusetts  02210-1928 Telephone: (617) 854-5200 Fax: (617) 723-7897 www.aberdeen.com 

 Media Contact: Bojan Simic Aberdeen Harte-Hanks (617) 854-5281 bojan.simic@aberdeen.com

SOURCE: Aberdeen Group

Source: MARKET WIRE

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