Could there be any more different consumers of technology than a rural primary school and the engineering faculty of a Russell Group University? The education ICT market is delicate – from the fragility of its funding to the vast range of knowledge and appetite for technology amongst its decision makers. Therefore, managed services have had very different levels of impact, but at Stone we’re beginning to see things change.
If you asked 10 teachers what a managed IT service was, you’d probably get a very varied set of answers. The now defunct Government BSF (Building Schools for the Future) program made managed services more common – BSF schools had a supplied and managed IT infrastructure. To some schools, a managed service is having 24/7 IT support from someone offsite, to a university faculty it may be outsourced print services.