IT organizations are using a plethora of managed services to help them more effectively manage their remote workers.

As I wrote last week, several factors are converging to cause a growing number of organizations to use managed services at their branch locations. In 2008, 63% of organizations plan to use some form of managed services, up from 46% in 2007, according to Nemertes newly released Advanced Communications Services benchmark.

They underlying reason IT decision-makers sign up for managed services is to help the staff’s abilities to perform basic functions, such as implementations, monitoring, training and troubleshooting.

Some IT executives said managed services were not always less expensive than handling them internally, in terms of hard dollars, though usually they are when considering all costs. More important, they said, was quality-of-life issues for the team (i.e., not having to be on call 24/7), the ability to keep them in more strategic positions, and the time saved by not having to send them to frequent training.

We asked participants of the benchmark to list the types of managed services they use. The largest response (49%) was for managed routers or other network gear.

Next in line was IP telephony management, at 22%--a significant increase from last year, when only 14% were using third parties for IP telephony management. Nemertes has been projecting such increases in the third-party IP telephony management space. In some cases, companies set out to implement IP telephony as a managed service because they don’t want to or don’t have the internal expertise to do otherwise. In other cases, they switch to managed services after a failed attempt internally.

Other managed services include implementation of WAN or telephony equipment (18%), break/fix or truck rolls (11%) and help desk (9%). Only 4% of the participants completely outsource their network management.

Bottom line: Managed services do, in fact, help IT staffs more effectively operate a virtual workplace - if the right processes, relationship management, and expectations are in place. More on this next week.

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