Its only in networking environments (or conversations with clients) that these conversations can start to take place so I can find someone to trust with my mission critical data. So online marketing is important I agree, its just the beginning of the search for a provider though, not the end of it.

Stu

David H. Deans

Side Note: David was among the guest speakers I recruited for an event last December attended by a few hundred VARs. Definitely a thought leader on Web marketing.

Try using a search term like “Find a Managed Service Provider” and view the top organic listings (not the paid Ads). Ask yourself, what are these MSPs doing that I’m not?

Why should MSPs become savvy online marketers? According to the latest market studies from the CMO Council, Forrester Research and others, the quest to find a best-fit business technology solution provider most often starts with a keyword search on Google.

That said, you would think that marketers are shifting their limited budgets to follow this trend. Again, research indicates this is typically not the case. In fact, most MSPs likely still use either direct mail, telephone cold-calling, and other methods that have proven to be ineffective.

It’s partly human nature — people stick to what they know, even when they know the predictable result is less that satisfactory. I predict that the seventh way to acquire customers, online marketing, will move up the list of all MSPs… eventually.

The smart ones already have begun to leverage the online channel for prospective customer relationship development. We know, again from market research, that selling managed services is clearly an educational process for the vast majority of new buyers.

Therefore, your website content must inform and guide your prospective customers. My point: if your online presence doesn’t systematically address the “buying facilitation” needs of your prospects, then you’re missing a huge opportunity to differentiate your business in the marketplace.

You want a Profitable Managed Services business model? Get your cost-per-sale in line with the market leaders. You can do it by becoming a savvy online marketer.

As a general point I would say that offsite backup has already experienced many of the cycles that other MS offerings are starting down the road.

The digisense thing is interesting, although I hadnt known the offering until you mentioned it. My gut reaction is that the barriers to entry for offsite backup providers ticks a few notches lower – you no longer even need to have a data centre/storage infrastructure because Amazon are tasked with taking care of it. Joe P has already (pretty much correctly imho) stated before Christmas that offsite backup is already a commodity.

And there begins my point.

We see people using S3 all the time. They are generally small sub 10 user networks who see it as a cheap backup strategy to get their data offsite and tick all the boxes. BUT HOW DO YOU GET YOUR DATA BACK – QUICKLY?? The S3 SLA is not going to support you – how do you get 20-500 GB to your customer – NOW ?? Over DSL this restore will take 4 days or more – 4 DAYS ??? But they need mail restored – now – and they need their CRM back – now – and they need Quickbooks etc back – NOW. You are providing YOUR customer a backup/DR solution and they will be shouting really loud for you to deliver.

Trust me. No-one shouts louder than a customer who thinks they have lost everything.

As an MSP beware of offering a backup service that could undermine the whole of your other efforts on that customer. “X MSP was brilliant at hosted mail and managing my network but I had a corrupted accounts system and I didnt recover it for 4 days…….”. We have a client who processes 1,000 orders for peripherals an hour. 4 days lost invoicing would – literally – kill their business.

I 100% would argue that any remote backup solution based on S3 storage is not solid. It is the cheap end of the cheap end. There already exists some big company backed entry level remote backup providers such as Mozy and Carbonite that do have some traction – please think long and hard before relying on an MSP who has no control over the recovery process.

Have you really seen Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) begin to impact the managed storage market, or is Amazon more of a long-term concern?

Managed storage is a nightmare market in my opinion. Amazon S3 has already imho murdered this market for value seeking MPS’s – a strong brand, decent infrastructure for $ cents per GB.

Where we see the add ons are in speed of restore, and full Disaster Recovery (DR) to an easily accessible environment – which the wonder of VM allows us to offer based on hugely scalable platforms for not much more investment.

The days of the old fashioned “dark site” are limited – more and more people will rely on a virtual DR environment, accessible anywhere through IP, to be hosted and managed by a specialist backup service provider.

I hope

Just a quick point of clarification for readers who are less familiar with MSPmentor: Joe Panettieri (me) is the guy who edits this site. Joe Paquet from Axis Business Solutions is the person who contributed this list for group discussion.

Are you adding any additional backup-related services to your base services? One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of MSPs are introducing managed storage — so I’m wondering how you differentiate.