Patricia Wilkey, the director of global desktop and mobility services for IT and business process outsourcing firm EDS, says much of the growth that her company has seen in managed LAN services has been the result of desktop applications such as instant messaging becoming converged with network management.

"If you look at how Exchange '07 works, for instance, you can now have unified messaging so your voice messages can be put into the Exchange environment. The enterprise is trying to really harness these productivity gains and link them to unified communications," she says.

Increased number of branch offices also a big driver

Moving all applications to IP is just one of the major factors driving managed LAN adoption. As companies invest more resources into creating branch offices, many of them are looking for ways to cut down on the number of IT staff they employ. So instead of having an entire IT department dedicated to managing LANs at branch offices, many of them are merely relying on third parties and consolidating their expenditures. Jim Pazour, a network supervisor at National American University, says that his network has to support about 6,000 students systemwide, in addition to 1,000 employees spread across 17 locations. There is simply no way for him and his staff to manage all the minutiae of campus LANs given their finite resources, he says.

"We need someone to monitor and maintain these LANs 24 hours a day and it would be too difficult for us to troubleshoot them all on our own," says Pazour, who has subscribed to Verizon Business's managed LAN services for the past three years. "We didn't want to have IT staff at all of our different locations."