Businesses lose competitive advantage as customer service suffers

Godalming, United Kingdom, 27th February, 2012: MTI, the specialist cloud infrastructure consultancy and integrator has found that 44% of IT professionals working in the UK feel that their team has not been given the capacity to accommodate increased demands placed on them, with only 11% able to say that they are fully resourced. The survey, which canvassed the opinions of over 100 IT professionals from around the UK found that reduction of capex budgets (49%), increasing volumes of data (48%) and demand for new technologies, such as cloud (43%), were among the biggest challenges that IT departments are tackling.

The strain on British IT departments is further illustrated by the fact that meeting these increased demands is “significantly eating into the working week” for 50% of respondents, with a further 16% stating that the situation is either “catastrophic” or “overwhelming” and 15% struggling to make ends meet. The result of this is that 41% admit to having to significantly compromise or struggle to provide the service required. 27% feel that adding extra resource to IT departments would allow them to become a strategic tool to make their businesses more competitive, with 53% claiming that customer service would be improved.

Richard Flanders, Marketing Director at MTI said: “British business leaders seem to be underestimating the power of their IT Departments to help them win market share. In tough economic times, anything that can give a business a competitive advantage and improve customer service would normally be seized upon.”

MTI conducted the research whilst developing MTI Care, a range of services that provide support for network analysis, virtualisation, backup, servers and storage, providing IT decision-makers with the ability to run fully optimised dynamic virtual environments.

By offering three service levels; Analyse, Manage and Complete, MTI Care can be tailored to any existing customer specific size and needs. The first level, Analyse, delivers an alerting, analysis, monitoring and reporting service, which can assist any organisation. Manage offers the Analyse benefits with additional remote management. Complete offers a complete methodical, onsite responsibility for your business.

“MTI Care helps IT departments understand and optimise their existing architecture, and can provide them with possible scenarios of new architectures to get the best return on investment,” added Flanders. “We want to ensure that businesses that use MTI can unlock their own resources and remove bottle-necks so that the IT department can deliver the strategic and competitive advantage to the business that they need to be able to do in the current economic landscape.”