6 Lingering Thoughts from Integration Business Outlook Webcast

Here’s a key metric to track. “If we can start tracking what our backlog is at a particular time as a percentage of revenue and try to keep the sales and management teams focused on having consistent backlog, it just makes the health of the company so much better,” Wilson said. Without that backlog, firms often scramble to find Q3 work, he added, and that’s when they compromise on margins. You’ve got to spend money to make money. As it has been every year, the industry’s struggle to migrate to managed services revenue was a highly emphasized topic. Yorktel was named Integrator of the Year in large part because of its success selling managed services. Part of the problem for other firms is likely an unwillingness to invest in personnel and infrastructure needed to deliver on managed services and the patience to wait for return on those investments. Getting started with managed services, particularly for a small company, “is going to be really expensive,” says Gaboury.