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Managed IT services in France
Managed IT services means handing over all or part of your IT to an outside provider. The idea was born in the United States in the 1960s and took off in the 1980s, with companies like Kodak handing their data centers over to players like IBM. Large French corporations followed in the 1990s.
Small businesses came to managed IT services by a different route: the computer. The person who sold you the computers was also the person you called when they broke down, and then the one you signed a maintenance contract with. XEFI, for example, one of the first networks in the industry in France, was founded in 1997 by a computer repairman from Lyon.
That route partly explains how the market is structured: more than 2,500 companies in France are active in "IT facilities management" (gestion d'installations informatiques), and 90% of them have fewer than 6 employees. These are local teams of 2 to 15 people, who know their clients and work less than an hour's drive away. We estimate the actual number of managed service providers (MSPs) in France is closer to 3,500, many of them registered under other codes, maintenance or consulting.
The top of the market belongs to large IT services firms, Capgemini, Sopra Steria or Atos, which run IT for large corporations and the public sector. For small businesses, a few national networks have been built through successive acquisitions. Koesio, which started in office equipment, has bought more than 260 companies since 1991. XEFI brings together more than 200 branches, for about €400M in revenue in 2025. Even these players are far from dominating a market that is highly fragmented.
The services on offer are remarkably uniform. Across 940 MSPs in the Paris region (Île-de-France) analyzed by Vauban, five services show up at more than two thirds of them:
- User support: an employee who no longer gets their email, a printer that stops responding, a locked password;
- Device maintenance: computer updates, the disk that's filling up and gets replaced before it fails;
- Network and phones: the office Wi-Fi, the internet box, the phone system;
- Backups: the copy of your data that lets you get back on your feet after a failure or ransomware;
- Cybersecurity: antivirus on every computer, the firewall at the entrance to the network.
Often added to these are hardware sales and leasing, IT strategy consulting, software integration, and so on.
When you ask MSPs themselves, the same topics come up:
- A replacement market: almost every client comes from another provider, and they left it over price or over competence, in roughly equal shares.
- Low daily incident volume: a branch serving 200 clients handles five to six incidents a day, with two technicians.
- Labor drives the price: on a basic plan at €30 per user, per month, tools account for about €6, and the rest pays the technicians.
Lagging technology and outdated business processes
Our neighbors take a harsh view of the French market. This summer, we talked with many American and British software vendors who sell their tools to MSPs around the world. They all use the same word to describe the French market: "unsophisticated."
Outdated or underused tools: to monitor computers remotely and track requests, many MSPs still use software from another generation. They don't switch out of habit, and because they don't take the time to update their technology. Those who have adopted recent tools, like NinjaOne, often drive a Ferrari like a Twingo. Automation, what these tools do best, remains underused: an alert pops up, a technician clicks, runs a script by hand, then closes the incident.
An inefficient incident management process: at many branches, requests come in by phone or email. A first contact takes notes, qualifies the incident and creates a ticket, then a technician calls the client back when they're free. Before it's even handled, a request can have cost the client one to two hours.
Resolution that is mostly human: once the request is opened, a technician handles it from start to finish. They gather the context of the incident, look through their tools and records, and resolve the request manually. A "noisy" client generates about one ticket per user per month, at 30 to 45 minutes of resolution per ticket. At €30 per user on a flat plan, labor already eats up most of the plan.
"No ticket, no work": the phrase comes from an MSP we talked with, and it sums up the model of French MSPs. The provider steps in when the client reports a problem, rarely beforehand, proactively, to prevent incidents.
These practices show up in the way the market sets its prices, and this is where France stands out most. In the United States and the United Kingdom, managed IT services are sold as all-inclusive plans: support, security and backups are included from the start, the price is often displayed transparently and clients know what they're paying for. A plan there rarely goes below $100 per user, per month.
In France, the logic is the reverse. The entry-level plan is cheap, around €30 per user, and the rest is billed on top. Many still sell an antivirus and prepaid hours, used up with each incident. And more than 96% of MSPs in the Paris region publish no prices at all (analysis carried out by Vauban on more than 900 MSPs).
This points to a certain mindset, one that treats managed IT services not as an investment but as a cost to cut. "In France, when you charge 40 bucks, people feel like they're being robbed." Providers line up on low prices, and quality of service follows price. Yet the opposite is what's needed: in a small business where every employee works on a computer, IT is the number one productivity lever.
Friction felt across the market
In a small business, almost everyone works on a computer, and business processes depend heavily on the software in use: email, shared documents, accounting, industry-specific tools. When you ask business owners and employees about their IT provider, they often talk about "the IT guy" you call as a last resort, who fixes the problem without explaining what he did, and who you know will be back next month for the same failure.
For most clients, IT remains a world apart, with its own acronyms and procedures. They hear about tenants, MFA or VPNs, they're asked to open a level 1 ticket or to allow remote access, without ever being told in plain language what is happening on their machines or why. Nothing is made simple or familiar: the CEO signs contracts they only half understand and employees put up with interventions they don't see the point of. IT becomes a black box, and the provider is the only one with the key.
Then comes responsiveness. An employee who can't log in anymore, a jammed printer, access to set up for a new hire: these requests are simple, but they wait for the provider to call back, one to two hours at best, sometimes several days. At an investment fund of about fifty people we spoke with, handling time sometimes reached three days. Meanwhile, the employee can't work, or works poorly, and it's often the office manager or the CEO who steps in to troubleshoot, even though it isn't their job.
That leaves the surprise invoice at the end of the month. The advertised plan rarely covers everything, and what falls outside it is discovered after the fact. An example we came across while talking with an MSP: a Windows update that doesn't install automatically requires a manual intervention, which is billed on top of the client's plan. Every new request then becomes a negotiation, and a commitment term of several months tied to equipment leasing makes leaving too expensive to consider calmly, which breeds distrust of providers.
IT should save teams time, but in many small businesses, it wastes time and costs more than expected.
Why Vauban?
We created Vauban to break with traditional managed IT services and so that IT can once again be what it should be for a small business: a productivity lever.
Vauban is outsourced IT support for small businesses, centered on people and augmented by artificial intelligence. Your team writes to us or calls us through the channel they already use (Slack, Teams, email or phone) and their request is picked up within 2 minutes, 24/7.
Everyday requests, like access to set up, a locked password or software that won't start, are handled automatically, and our technicians focus on the ones that need a real human eye. Your devices are monitored continuously: updates, backups and security vulnerabilities are tracked before they turn into failures, and employee arrivals and departures are prepared in advance.
Our managed IT services offering takes on, point by point, what small businesses told us they no longer want. The price is public, per user, per month, and everything included is written down, line by line: an update that requires an intervention will never be billed to you on top. You try the service with no commitment, then the contract can be canceled with 3 months' notice. If you leave, we don't hold anything back: you get the access and the documentation for everything we've done. We recover your access, email and files from your previous provider ourselves. You follow the state of your devices live, on a portal, and receive a monthly written report with no jargon.
We are convinced that the quality of service from MSPs needs to improve significantly, by making full use of new technologies, so that small businesses can feel productive again and trust their IT.
