MSPmentor

During his morning keynote session at Autotask Community Live, Chief Marketing Officer Bob Vogel offered some quick stats about the company’s online community. In some ways, I think the community resembles an open source project. Here’s why.

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This is part one of an anticipated two-part post. The news: MSP Partners — working with CompTIA (Computing Technology Industry Association) and IPED (Institute for Partner Education and and Development) — is launching an accreditation test for managed service providers. Here’s the quick scoop, plus some questions I need to get answered.

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Monday at Autotask Community Live is now history. Here are eight quick highlights — so far — from the managed services conference held in Nashville, Tenn.:

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During the Autotask Community Live conference in Nashville, Tenn., Autotask CEO Bob Godgart disclosed some company financial milestones. Godgart also described how Autotask hopes to eliminate the walls between managed service providers (MSPs) and corporate IT. Here are four quick highlights from Godgart’s keynote.

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Nearly 40 percent of managed service providers already offer some form of managed print services, with an additional 34 percent of MSPs formulating managed print strategies now, according to MSPmentor’s weekly reader poll. Here’s a look at the stats.

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Microsoft plans to ship a Windows 7 release candidate this May, and Mary Jo Foley (the top blogger following Microsoft) suspects the completed Windows 7 will debut in the third calendar quarter of 2009. But I wonder: Will Windows Vista’s successor drive new revenue opportunities for managed service providers? Or are Windows upgrades now ho-hum events for MSPs and VARs alike?

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A few days ago, I reported NetEnrich veteran Prakash Chaudhari had joined Autotask in India. Turns out Chaudhari has launched a company — called MSPONE Managed Services Solutions — that will represent both Autotask and LPI Level Platforms Inc. in India. The move comes roughly five months after Kaseya expanded its operations in India. Here’s some more perspective on the competitive moves.

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Eric Webster at Intronis Technologies sent me a storage horror story, involving a service provider that lost the backups of more than 7,500 customers. Now, the same story is making headlines across the blogosphere. Here’s a look at the details, plus the implications for managed service providers.

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Amy Katz and I land in Nashville, Tenn., this Sunday (March 29) for the Autotask Community Live conference. The grapevine tells me roughly 300 IT service providers and managed service providers will converge on Nashville for the conference, plus many of the remote monitoring tool providers will be on hand. Here are five discussion points we’ll be tracking at the event.

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Want to generate some buzz for an upcoming conference? Steal a page from Robin Robins. Some pundits give away iPods at conferences. Other marketing leaders give away netbooks. But Robins is driving in a different direction and going viral to promote a managed services event. Hint: Somebody’s going to win a Jaguar. Here’s the scoop and the viral video to prove it.

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A couple of new, high-level career opportunities have surfaced in our MSPmentor Career Center. One is a managed services practice manager for Light Industries in Maryland. The other is a director of managed services support for PRI Technology, a New York-based managed service provider that generates $5 million in recurring annual MSP revenue. Check out the job posts in our Career Center — and feel free to add your own career posts. The service is free from MSPmentor.

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This blog entry has nothing — and everything — to do with managed services. Let me explain: I’ve been riding the economic roller coaster this week. Monday, I visited my accountant and heard horror stories about the credit crunch destroying small businesses across New York — the type of small companies that typically pay for managed services. But Wednesday, a simple comment from a small business owner lifted my spirits. Dramatically.

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A friendly reminder: If you’re a solutions provider trying to understand how to profit from Amazon Web Services, Google Apps and software as a service (SaaS), then please join me for The VAR Guy Live, a webcast scheduled for April 15 at 2:00pm eastern. Two progressive solutions providers will describe their experiences launching CRM and BI (business intelligence) applications in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). And one VAR will describe his work in the Google Apps Reseller program. It should be a lively discussion about SaaS business models in the channel.

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Autotask will unveil a steady stream of news during the Autotask Community Live conference, starting March 29 in Nashville, Tenn. The event’s central focus will involve collaboration and community. Autotask CEO Bob Godgart (pictured) offered some thoughts to me yesterday. And if you look back at some 2008 Autotask announcements, it provides some clues about what’s on tap for next week.

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In separate but somewhat related news items, The Wall Street Journal and Symantec are evangelizing managed services to broader audiences. The newspaper has published a pretty big story declaring managed services as the hot trend in telecommunications. And Symantec has unveiled research that tracks growing demand for managed security services.

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Software as a service. Cloud services. If you believed the hype, you’d think all managed service providers (MSPs) need to completely shift their customers from on-premise solutions to online solutions. But many of the strongest SaaS proponents still launch on-premise solutions for MSPs. Why? Because 80 percent of the software market will involve on-premise IT for years to come.

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Within the span of 30 minutes yesterday, three separate sources told me they’re expanding their managed services sales staff in order to lift recurring revenues during the recession. But in each case the story was the same: To fill new sales positions without breaking the bank, the MSP is offering lower base pay and increasing commission rates.

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I overlooked this piece of news from last week — until I spotted it on Jeff Kaplan’s blog: NetSuite, one of the better-known ERP software as a service (SaaS) providers, has launched a cloud for ISVs (independent software vendors) to develop and deploy new applications. But this isn’t the only way to build a cloud service.

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I have a theory about startups (companies forming during this recession) that hasn’t been tested yet, so I’ve been reaching out to my network for input — on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, lots of emails, a few chats over coffee, and now here.

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I’ll be at the Autotask Community Live conference starting March 29, but news slated for the event is starting to leak out on Autotask’s Twitter feed. Here are three Autotask tweets that caught my ears (actually, my eyes).

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When Cisco Systems unveiled its unified computing strategy last week, most folks (including me) believed the effort focused mainly on midsize and large customers. But if you take a closer look, the unified computing effort indirectly targets small businesses as well. Here’s how.

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Zmanda is connecting the dots between open source backup, cloud-based storage, Microsoft applications and managed services. Zmanda CEO Chander Kant told me a bit about the effort Thursday in New York. Here are some details.

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Successful managed service providers understand the basic truisms of technology: Clients just want it to work, so don’t bother them with how it works. Second, technology is the means to an end, which is to support business operations and goals. MSPs who understand these realities also understand the importance of addressing clients’ common IT pain points. Here’s how to get started.

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