Data Center Infrastructure Management Market Procurement Intelligence Report

The market for Business Support and its sub-segments such as Data Center Infrastructure Management are at an interesting intersection. Buyers of Data Center Infrastructure Management are insisting on hard evidence to support cost reduction. Suppliers are responding with elaborate matrix of KPIs that provide managers actionable data on supplier performance and cost savings achieved.

Outsourcing of Data Center Infrastructure Management now represents a significant part of the global spend on this category, driven by value derived and a growing number of vendors who keep innovating with new services and value propositions.

Several macro level trends such as slowing economic growth, trade conflicts, rising wages and technological disruptions have put pressure on managers to reduce their spend on Data Center Infrastructure Management without affecting the performance.

Trends like these and many others discussed in this report are necessitating a relook at the way Data Center Infrastructure Management is procured and the procurement cost saving opportunities that exist.

Data Center Infrastructure Management procurement best practices are moving towards a level of sophistication which is typically seen in traditional procurement categories. Category managers now have an attractive opportunity to adapt the best practices seen within this category as well as those being leveraged in other non-related categories. This report summarizes the best practices picked from across multiple categories that could work well for category managers involved with Data Center Infrastructure Management procurement strategy.

For example, Category managers must explore opportunities to integrate planning and management activities of categories using analytics, to gain better control over category spend. This will also allow them to consolidate their supply base easily, as well as to segment suppliers based on requirements and spend on each supplier.

Investing in benchmarking studies that help category managers enhance their knowledge on pricing or billing rates of suppliers allows them to not only save costs, but also negotiate better with suppliers. For example, while negotiating for bundled services, they can save significantly on a single service by cross-verifying rates quoted by suppliers against industry benchmarks.

Buyers must clearly define clauses pertaining to the ownership of sub-contracting services that are not a part of their preferred suppliers' portfolios. This will ensure consistency in the services of sub-contracted firms as well as protection of confidential data.

Data Center Infrastructure Management procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Data Center Infrastructure Management procurement. Some examples include: