Managed Service Providers See Automation as ‘Biggest Need’ in 2023, Study Says

Improving operational efficiency is the No. 1 challenge for managed service providers to achieve steady growth and profitability, according to AIOps platform OpsRamp. Enterprises also pointed to automating as many operations as possible as the biggest need or challenge they were trying to overcome in 2023.

These were some of the results of a new study commissioned by OpsRamp on the state of AIOps technology adoption and development. Fifty-five percent of respondents said built-in monitoring/native instrumentation ranked as the most important feature of an AIOps solution. The study concludes that AIOps is delivering real benefits for enterprises and MSPs. This is as two-thirds of respondents have concerns about how accurate the data are going into their AIOps systems.

The global economy is facing headwinds on multiple fronts including inflation, the cost-of-living crisis, higher interest rates and war in Ukraine. As a result, enterprises and MSPs are focused on improving IT efficiency and automation this year.

The OpsRamp State of AIOps 2023 study (conducted in December by a third-party research firm) includes input from 265 participants. They work as the general manager, director or vice president level at enterprises and MSPs in North America, Europe or Asia Pacific. All respondents have budget decision-making responsibilities for IT monitoring tools. They work at firms with at least $25 million in annual revenue and more than 500 employees.

AIOps Improves Automation Capabilities for Managed Service Providers       

More than 60% of respondents were adopting AIOps to improve service and application availability and performance. The second and third top choices were for automation of operations (58%) and processes (54%). Meanwhile, the greatest IT operations challenge for enterprises in 2023 was automating as many operations as possible. The was according to two-thirds (66%) of respondents. Yet barely half of respondents (52%) cited automation of tedious tasks as their primary operational benefit of AIOps. This trailed reduction in open incident tickets (65%) and reduction in MTTD and MTTR (56%). Improvements in automation are clearly top of mind for enterprises and MSPs in 2023.

OpsRamp’s Suresh Vobbilesetty

Suresh Vobbilesetty is executive vice president, engineering at OpsRamp.

“The study shows that AIOps is real and is delivering tangible benefits for enterprises and MSPs,” Vobbilesetty said. “But it also shows that organizations’ AIOps initiatives remain a work in progress and have a ways to go before they can realize the full potential of the technology. OpsRamp, with hybrid and multi-cloud discovery and monitoring, proactive event management and intelligent automation on a single platform, can help these organizations achieve their AIOps goals faster.”