MSPmentor

I had a quick call with Jim Hamilton, executive director of MSP Partners, on Wednesday night. He told me a bit about the organization’s new 2009 education program for managed service providers. Here are some details.

For starters, MSP Partners has introduced a “master” membership level, designed to offer deeper content and more training information to MSPs that already understand the basics of managed services.

According to an MSP Partners press release, new content for 2009 includes:

• On‐demand courses covering both foundational Managed Services concepts as well as advanced concepts dealing with marketing, sales, operations and best in class Managed Services practices, all based on extensive and exclusive new 2009 research.
• Eight 2009 live web events describing new Managed Services opportunities in networking, security, business continuity and more.
• An MSP Benchmark tool that evaluates a solution provider’s Managed Services business and provides a detailed best in class analysis. (That sounds particularly interesting to me.)
• An “Ask an Expert” feature, where industry thought leaders answer members’ Managed Services questions. (And that sounds particularly familiar to me — since we have our own Ask a Mentor inbox.)
• Monthly analysis of current trends in the Managed Services market.

Admittedly, some of MSP Partners’ organizational efforts overlap with MSPmentor’s editorial efforts — from our Ask a Mentor inbox to our MSPmentor Live: CEO Exchange events. But we’ve maintained a healthy dialog with Hamilton and the MSP Partners team for more than a year now. We even golfed together once (ask Jim about my handicap…).

And in the interest of equal time, there are a range of organizations and associations that MSPs can explore — including the MSPAlliance and CompTIA (Computing Technology Industry Association).

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