Comments on: The Ups and Downs of Managed Services http://www.mspmentor.net/2007/09/20/the-ups-and-downs-of-managed-services/ Managed Services & Cloud Services Blog for VARs & MSPs Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:25:29 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Nick http://www.mspmentor.net/2007/09/20/the-ups-and-downs-of-managed-services/comment-page-1/#comment-2 Nick Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:22:51 +0000 http://72.19.232.109/?p=10#comment-2 I don't think that being an MSP is ever going to be the "be-all-end-all" of SMB IT services. Because as soon as you figure out the MSP piece, you start trying to figure out HaaS, and then you starting trying to figure out hosted offerings and moving up the solution stack. Worse case, you ride the pendulum of pricing – from break/fix, to block-hours, to managed-services, to a hybrid offer to… whatever’s over the next horizon. At the end of the day, you can roll all kinds of stuff (and risk) into the contract, and have a very elaborate offering. But the bottom-line is still client satisfaction. Write-up the contract any way you'd like, but if the client can't get someone on-site in a pinch, you're the one who’s going to suffer - regardless of what terms or SLA's are identified in the contract. The other piece to this is reaching a critical-mass where you've spread out your risk across a client base - and you can afford a bit more client turnover. I don’t think that being an MSP is ever going to be the “be-all-end-all” of SMB IT services. Because as soon as you figure out the MSP piece, you start trying to figure out HaaS, and then you starting trying to figure out hosted offerings and moving up the solution stack. Worse case, you ride the pendulum of pricing – from break/fix, to block-hours, to managed-services, to a hybrid offer to… whatever’s over the next horizon.
At the end of the day, you can roll all kinds of stuff (and risk) into the contract, and have a very elaborate offering. But the bottom-line is still client satisfaction. Write-up the contract any way you’d like, but if the client can’t get someone on-site in a pinch, you’re the one who’s going to suffer – regardless of what terms or SLA’s are identified in the contract.

The other piece to this is reaching a critical-mass where you’ve spread out your risk across a client base – and you can afford a bit more client turnover.

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