Sometime this week, Jamcracker is expected to formally unveil its MSP LaunchPad strategy for managed service providers. Steve Crawford, Jamcracker’s VP of marketing, walked me through the LaunchPad initiative on June 17.
MSP LaunchPad sounds like the best of both worlds: It strives to help VARs quickly move into the managed services space, and also includes a range of options to help MSPs manage all of their business operations.
But will MSP LaunchPad work as advertised? And how does it differ from so-called Master MSP offerings from Do IT Smarter, Ingram Micro Seismic and the like? I don’t have all the answers, but here are some initial thoughts.
In some ways, MSP LaunchPad sounds like a massive, virtual Home Depot for VARs and MSPs. Walk up and down Jamcracker’s virtual aisles, and select the MSP and SaaS (software as a service) components you want without ever having to go to another store or another vendor.
Instead of competing head-on with Master MSPs, Jamcracker seems committed to partnering with them. Through partnerships with MSP Warehouse and Do IT Smarter, Jamcracker allows MSPs to choose from third-party remote desktop and IT monitoring and management platforms.
According to Jamcracker’s Crawford, MSP LaunchPad offers:
- Hosted service delivery tools, including Kaseya and Level Platforms
- A catalogue of on-demand applications for resale, from Microsoft, IBM, McAfee, Cisco and others
- An integration toolkit for on-boarding and bundling existing services
- Order management, service provisioning, customer administration and billing
- Automated services-delivery workflow engine
- 24×7 L1/L2 customer support
Cleared for Liftoff?
Will MSP LaunchPad work as advertised? I haven’t tested the system, and Jamcracker’s decision to offer all of those third-party services (coupled with Jamcracker’s own back-office options) sounds like a monumental undertaking.
Still, Jamcracker isn’t a naive start-up. The company survived the dot-com bust, and navigated its way through the ASP (application service provider) hype cycle a few years ago.
Before launching Jamcracker in 1999, founder and CEO K.B. Chandrasekhar launched Exodus Communications, an early leader in enterprise Web hosting. Exodus ultimately collapsed in 2001 during the dot-com implosion. But Chandrasekhar was already hard at work at Jamcracker by that time, and he is widely credited for laying the foundation for many of the managed services and hosting services we now take for granted.
As MSPs ramp up with Jamcracker MSP LaunchPad, we’ll provide some progress reports to our readers.
Posted In: Platforms | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: Do IT Smarter | Jamcracker | K.B.Chandrasekhar | Managed Service Provider | Managed Services | MSP | MSP LaunchPad | MSP Warehouse
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Is Jamcracker hosting Level Platforms and Kaseya or reselling those hosted services on behalf of Do IT Smarter and other companies? I’m wondering if Jamcracker is an online mall for MSP products, or if Jamcracker also does all the hosting of those products?
James: I’ve asked Jamcracker to reply to your inquiry. I will make sure they get back to you.
Hi James,
We don’t host any of these services, but rather aggregate the provisioning, administration, billing, help desk and call center support, and provide SSO to applications that are hosted by others. In the case of Level Platforms, Do IT Smarter is the hosting provider, and for Kaseya it’s our partner MSP Warehouse. The 2-3 dozen other SaaS ISVs that we provide in our reseller catalog are hosted by either the ISV themselves (e.g. McAfee, WebEx) or a 3rd party data center (e.g. Rackspace for Hosted Exchange, Dynamics and Sharepoint). So from this perspective we’re essentially a giant “switch in the cloud”, and focus our value-add on the aggregation, support, and providing a means for resellers and their customers to fulfill their SaaS and services needs.
Our philosophy is that the expertise for any given service resides with the company that developed it or is running it as part of their core business. But it’s a huge overhead and expense burden for resellers to have to establish direct relationships with every vendor who’s services they need or want to sell. So our strategy is to provide a one-stop-shopping and support experience for our resellers (telcos, service providers, VARs, and now MSPs) to be able to source, bundle, and resell all of these services to their customers.
From a business perspective we are a master distributor of all of these SaaS products, and the transfer price we are able to provide is typically on par and usually better than what you could get from the ISV directly, because we are doing collective bargaining on behalf of lots of resellers of all sizes, and off-loading a lot of the channel management and support burden.
So, to use Joe’s Home Depot analogy, if you were just getting into the business of carpentry and wanted to build houses, you could go to Home Depot and get everything you needed for your business. You would visit the tool crib to buy your tools, purchase building materials and fixtures, and rent a truck to deliver the goods to a building site. You don’t have to take on the overhead of managing a direct relationship with the lumberyard, the tools providers, and fixture companies — and most likely the contractor discount you get from Home Depot is going to be as good or better than dealing directly. That way you can focus on your core value-add — building quality houses for your customers.
The MSP LaunchPad portal will be live tomorrow. I’ll come back and post the link.
Steve
Steve: Thanks for clarifying Jamcracker’s strategy. And to give credit where credit is due, I think you brought up the Home Depot analogy before I did, during our call.
Best,
-jp
We are excited to be working with Jamcracker on this solution. It enables us to reach many more resellers with our hosted Level Platforms solution and also brings a considerable value add over going with us direct as they have the integrated catalog, estore and billing functionality.
Hey Lane: How soon does Do IT Smarter’s relationship with Jamcracker start? And I assume readers can get more info by going right to your site (www.doitsmarter.com)?
Readers can get more information about the Level Platforms services from our website under the Tools section. As for when it will be available through Jamcracker, very soon.
MSP LaunchPad is open for business!
Visit https://msp.jam-mart.com to browse and acquire tools such as Level Platforms and Kaseya, and also to view many different end-user SaaS applications that you can acquire on behalf of your customers. We’re continually adding more services, so keep checking back.
If you would like to set up your own branded administration portal and earn additional margins on the SaaS subscriptions you provide for your customers, then register at http://jamcracker.com/market-storm/index.html.
If you have any questions, please send a note to info@jamcracker.com, or visit the MSP LaunchPad Program overview at http://www.jamcracker.com/msp.
Thanks,
Steve