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The question is rarely ‘should we use managed hosting or do it ourselves’. The question is ‘where should the boundary sit between us and a managed-hosting partner’. This guide is about how to draw that line for your estate.
Three honest patterns
In practice, organisations end up in one of three places.
Pattern A: Fully internal
The client runs the whole stack: infrastructure, OpenShift platform, MAS application operations, application support. Suits organisations with mature platform engineering teams, multiple workloads on the same platform, and strong Maximo-specific skills already in-house.
Pattern B: Partner-managed end-to-end
The partner runs infrastructure, platform, application operations and application support. The client owns the data, the configuration decisions and the relationship. Suits organisations that want to focus internal capability on the maintenance and asset management work, not the platform engineering.
Pattern C: Hybrid
Some of each. Common patterns include client-owned infrastructure with partner-managed application operations; or partner-managed platform with internal application support; or partner-managed normally and on-call for incidents only. Hybrid works when the boundary is clear and the responsibility map is unambiguous.
The wrong answer is unclear boundaries. That is where outages live.
Decision criteria
Do you already run platform engineering at scale?
If yes, fully internal or hybrid both work. If no, partner-managed end-to-end is usually the better call. Building a platform team for one workload is rarely a good investment.
Is Maximo a strategic in-house capability or a supporting platform?
For some organisations, EAM expertise is a core capability that should live in-house. For others, EAM is a supporting platform that should free internal teams to focus on the operational work itself. Be honest about which one Maximo is for you. Both answers are legitimate.
How critical is response time on incidents?
Partner-managed hosting with a strong SLA and named engineers usually beats internal teams on response time, especially out of hours. Internal teams can match this only if you fund them to do so, which is rarely the cheapest answer.
How does your audit and security regime treat third-party operations?
Some regulated environments restrict third-party access to operational data. This pushes towards internal or onshore-only managed hosting with explicit access controls. Modern managed-hosting practices accommodate this; it just needs designing in.
What is the right balance of fixed versus variable cost?
Internal teams are largely fixed cost. Managed hosting is largely variable / subscription cost. Neither is universally right; it depends on how predictable your estate’s growth is.
Costs: the comparison that matters
Realistic comparison includes:
- Internal: platform engineers, Maximo administrators, application support specialists, on-call rota, recruitment cost, retention cost, training cost, infrastructure
- Managed: subscription / managed-services fee, residual internal coordination time, infrastructure (if not bundled)
The mistake organisations make is comparing ‘managed-hosting fee’ against ‘salary of one Maximo administrator’. The fair comparison includes the full team needed to cover platform, application, on-call and absence — usually three to five FTEs minimum to do this properly internally for a single estate of any meaningful size.
What a good managed-hosting service looks like
If you are evaluating managed hosting, the test is not the brochure. The test is:
- Named engineers on your account, not a rotating queue
- An SLA you can read and that connects to penalties you would actually invoke
- Direct access to your engineers, not through a generic service desk
- Transparent change records so you can see what changed and why
- Application support and minor change available under the same roof, not a hand-off
- Hosting on enterprise-grade cloud with documented security controls and sensible region choice
- Clear backup, restore and DR with regular tested recovery, not just documented procedures
How MaxIron fits
Our managed-hosting practice runs MAS on enterprise-grade cloud with named engineers, transparent change tooling, and the option to bundle application support into the same relationship. We are equally happy taking over an existing estate from another supplier or hosting from day one of a new implementation.
If you would like a direct conversation about which model fits your operation, get in touch.
Talk to the people who would actually deliver it
No pitch deck, no pressure. A direct conversation with one of our senior consultants.
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