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Computerworld - You might say that Premier Inc. in Charlotte, N.C., is through with outsourcing. Three years ago, it let its contract with its provider of five years run out and insourced nearly all aspects of IT. But there's one function the health care consultancy couldn't justify bringing back in-house: the help desk, says Greg Archer, vice president of corporate IT services.

Unlike other areas of IT, the help desk wasn't supporting a rapidly changing business model. Considering the time and cost involved in developing the help desk infrastructure itself, plus training and managing personnel, outsourcing looked favorable, he says.

But Archer didn't turn to a traditional outsourcer; he hired Everdream Corp., a Fremont, Calif.-based managed service provider (MSP) that provides Web-hosted desktop management services. Now, when Premier users call the help desk, each call is answered by an Everdream technician who -- thanks to agent technology deployed on the users' PCs -- can troubleshoot and fix the issue remotely. If the problem is too complex, it can be escalated to Premier's on-site staff. The agent technology also alerts Everdream to which PCs need the latest patches so the MSP can automatically update them over the Internet.

"The demands our business is putting on us are causing us to change rapidly, with the exception of the help desk, which is more standardized and isn't going to change significantly," Archer says. "And at the same time, we knew we could improve our service levels" via an MSP.

As more businesses like Premier turn to MSPs, they are taking a hard look at their IT operations before slicing off a piece that's MSP-friendly. The final decision depends on how companies view their IT operations -- what's core, what's rote, what they don't have the resources for and what they wouldn't trust anyone but themselves to do. And those determinations must be weighed against the many benefits an MSP can offer, such as reduced costs and automated operations, as well as possible pitfalls of this model, such as security issues or the inflexibility of a one-size-fits-all application.

In Premier's case, going with an MSP -- combined with insourcing its other IT operations -- has resulted in increased uptime on all of the company's core systems, improved customer satisfaction and at least $2 million in savings, Archer says.

But for another company, handing over desktop management to an MSP might be a big mistake, says Jeff Kaplan, managing director of Thinkstrategies Inc. in Wellesley, Mass. "Some organizations have a culture that permits a certain amount of customization in the desktop arena, which may not be acceptable from an MSP perspective, since they might need to standardize the platforms to effectively manage them," he says.