Service Providers are worried about the future prospects of their current managed service offerings in the face of emerging competition. More and more customer compute dollars could flow toward cloud providers with huge scale advantages like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. I get the concern. But the cloud genie is not going back in the bottle. Here’s how to move forward.
End users of all sizes are already embracing public cloud services. SPs can either understand this as a fact of life and figure out ways to add value in a cloud delivered IT world or be destined for irrelevance. On the other hand, the “ahead of the curve” guys — the SPs that understand the concept of “Unified Monitoring” will certainly thrive. The key Unified Monitoring concept to keep in mind — to stay ahead of the curve — is the “Single Pane of Glass” Service Delivery Portal.
Everything In One Place
End users do not want to look at three, four, five or more different portals for information on system performance and availability — one branded portal from their SaaS Provider, one from their Managed Hosting Provider, one from their Cloud Provider, Collocation Site and Internal IT — Yikes! That dispersion of information is inherently very risky, time consuming and inefficient. So consolidating the data from all providers into a single, secure, Unified Service Delivery Portal is a very high value Managed Service in itself.
The next step up the value chain is transforming the data inside the Service Delivery Portal into actionable information in order to help customers make smarter cloud decisions. For example, a Service Provider could instrument and compare the email transit times between Google Business Email and Microsoft Exchange Online for a customer evaluating cloud delivered email. While certainly not the only relevant data point to analyze, end to end measurement of cloud services is typical of the monitoring that can be done right now. By the way, isn’t this the same type of work that SPs do every day to help their customers choose between HP and IBM servers, NetApp and EMC storage and so on? Same trusted advisor role – simply different technologies to evaluate and recommend.
Here’s an even stronger value add example from a cloud delivered world. Say you have a customer using Amazon’s EC2 compute services – in addition to the managed services you provide – in addition to the stuff they run internally. What can you do, as an SP, as trusted advisor, if Amazon’s EC2 performance starts to degrade or fails completely? You may think, “It’s Amazon’s problem.” I can’t task a bunch of smartie engineers to fix Amazon. You would be perfectly right about that, but that’s old school MSP thinking.
If you were already monitoring Amazon’s EC2 — you could implement EC2 transaction-based performance thresholds based on customer business requirements. Then if the EC2 service begins to degrade — a performance threshold will breach, launch an alarm to your NOC, and you proactively help your customer shift workloads to another provider before the services crash. Seems like a very high value managed service to me — one that customers will appreciate and buy – and one that today’s SPs are well positioned to execute. Think of it as a cloud variant of the High Availability (HA) services you architect and deliver today.
Your Brand First
Anybody that sells anything for a living knows about the critical nature of account control. Whether you are Google, ESPN or a Mid-Sized Service Provider Account Executive carrying a bag, you probably spend a lot of time keeping your brand prominently in front of customers and your competitors’ brand as invisible as possible. Here’s the problem – your customers are going to go somewhere for cloud instrumentation. It is their responsibility to stay on top of all IT systems regardless of where the service originates. Personally, if I were an SP with customers using public cloud services I would burn the midnight oil figuring out how to keep my customers at my branded service delivery portal rather than having them “change the channel” to go get it at Amazon or another SP competitor. This strikes me as a no brainer – be the center of the customer’s IT world – your brand preeminent 24×7x365.
End users need help making sense of their cloud options. The Service Delivery Portal — the single pane of glass — is the concept that SPs need to wrap their mind around to stay trusted advisor and primary service provider.
Phil LaForge is VP and GM, service providers at Nimsoft. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor.net’s 2009 Platinum sponsorship. Read all of Phil’s guest blog entries here.
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Tags: Cloud Service Provider | CSP | Managed Cloud Services | NimSoft | Phil LaForge
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Great article, this is a problem we’ve been frustrated by for a long time. We built a product called JoomConnect. It has two primary goals, both are client/prospect facing. JoomConnect automates/enhances website marketing activities and lead capture to ConnectWise and integrates client portals to the MSP’s website.
The first issue we tackled was integrating the ConnectWise Client Portal to the MSP’s website providing a single logon for both portals. We launched this app on September 28th of this year.
We are currently working with multiple companies to integrate their client portals and products with the JoomConnect platform. So far some of these integrations include Reflexion (http://www.reflexion.net), Exchange Defender (http://www.exchangedefender.com) and ConnectSmart (http://www.connect-smart.com), there are a few more we’re not ready to announce yet.
Clients will login to the MSP’s website and have 1 click access to each portal, without having to remember multiple urls, usernames and passwords.
We are actively pursuing additional integration partners, our ultimate goal is to integrate every client facing portal an MSP might provide to their clients via the JoomConnect Platform. This will keep the client coming back to the MSP’s website every time they want to access their portals.
It’s not a full “dashboard” (yet) but it’s a start. Can’t wait to see where this leads.
—
Chris Chase
CEO
JoomConnect / DTi
http://www.joomconnect.com
I’ll vouch for what Chris mentioned up there, the easier it is for people to access ExchangeDefender the quicker they can manage the service and be more profitable.
Typically what happens is the ticket gets filed somewhere, someone (with proper credentials) then digs them out, logs into another portal, manages whatever needed to be managed and the entire process relies on management of information on multiple platforms and systems. Doing so seamlessly and securely makes for a more profitable provider.
-Vlad
Chris, Vlad: Thanks for building on Phil’s thoughts.
Hi Phil: I know you avoided the temptation to evangelize Nimsoft’s own dashboard in your blog post. I got a few private emails asking if such a dashboard exists but frankly I haven’t tried Nimsoft’s dashboard so I don’t know what’s real/delivered right now. I won’t hold it against you if you post a comment about Nimsoft’s approach.
-jp
Just to clarify, when I said dashboard I wasn’t referring to a monitoring dashboard like what Nimsoft is doing. Our dashboard would be to access client portals, which could even be the Nimsoft client portal login for their dashboard. Maybe I should be calling them too
I just went and checked out the Nimsoft Dashboard, cool stuff!
-Chris
HI Chris, Vlad,
Sounds like we envision a similar end game – cool. Very soon the Nimsoft Service Delivery Portal will support standards based portlet integration. We’ll bring Service Desk, CMDB, Asset Management tools, etc. from other providers into the single pane of glass, so customers can be in one place to run all things IT.
If you visit http://www.unifiedmonitoring.com you’ll get an idea about the broad array of performance and availability instrumentation – from internal data center to cloud – that is available today.
Best – Phil
We started working on a our unified interface a few month ago and plan to launch before end of month. Monthly reports from our PSA and quarterly business reviews simply don’t make the msp offering as tangible and ‘real’ as as your own branded website with realtime stats, record of work, tutorials and some self service tools.
We’ll be connecting into our PSA and RMM databases and combine that info with other solutions.
My inspiration came from the control panels that alot of web hosting companies offer their customers.
Joe – I’ll send a link over when it’s ready!
Gerson
http://www.degasystems.com
Gerson: Thanks for the heads up. I’ll be waiting for the link.
Phil: Thanks for triggering this conversation with your blog entry.
-jp
Glad to see our friends at Nimsoft lining up with us on this. Remote monitoring of cloud applications will soon be a basic requirement for MSPs serving the SMB market. Here is a press release from May when we launched this service offering with Microsoft’s BPOS as well as a detailed description of the strategy.
http://www.levelplatforms.com/files/Press_Releases/2009-05-13_LPI_Launches_Cloud_Services_FINAL_May_14.pdf
Since the launch we have continued to announce new monitoring Solution Sets for SMB Cloud Services providers.
Peter Sandiford
)
See All. Manage All.
(hey that tag line is starting to make sense