It is critical that IT service providers not only understand this shift but are prepared and don't fall behind in delivering value to their customers every day.
A new LogMeIn research study, “The Next Evolution of IT Service Providers: Changing Direction to Embrace BYOA,” explores the impact of BYOA on the channel and offers practical insights for IT service providers to monetize the opportunity and gain a strategic market position. According to this study, which gathers the opinions of IT service providers and their customers in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, IT service provider customers have more power than ever, given that approximately 70% of enterprise end users practice BYOA.  
The future of IT services includes BYOA, and the time to monetize the growing number of consumer applications and act as a trusted partner for current and future customers is now.

Some of the most important findings of this study are:
• BYOA is here to stay.
77% of respondents indicate that BYOA will remain the same or increase significantly over the next five years. On the other hand, those who believe the BYOA trend will disappear only justify this if IT service providers and their customers take joint action at the company-wide level.

• IT service providers seriously underestimate the impact of BYOA.
There are seven times more applications entering the workplace than IT previously estimated. IT service providers in this global study estimate that an average of 2.7 applications were introduced by end users into their clients' businesses.

• End users aren't happy with what they're given.
More than half the time, BYOA duplicates an existing solution. Regardless of whether you have apps for syncing and sharing, collaboration, remote access, and other features, end users will always find, implement, and adopt a solution they like over the solutions your company offers in its portfolio.

• BYOA offers a significant monetization opportunity.
77% of IT service providers are looking to this trend as an opportunity to develop packages that drive new revenue streams and offer a unique competitive advantage over their competitors. In fact, 39% are already actively offering BYOA services or beginning to package them, and another 39% are planning to offer them in the future.

IT service providers that act as strategic enablers will be more successful.
To establish their role as IT advisors on BYOA, IT service providers must become strategic enablers of cloud applications for the customers they support.