If only we had two extra hours per day… The extra time would certainly help us to keep pace with the managed services market. Here are seven managed services blog entries we didn’t have time to write for the week ending January 15, 2010.
7. MSP Move?: I sense FalconStor will likely assign someone to manage and build the company’s MSP partnerships. Much in the way that Nimsoft targets the higher-end RMM (remote monitoring and management) market, I sense FalconStor will do the same in the online backup and disaster recovery market.
6. Done Deals: High Street Technology Ventures is expected to complete its buyout of MSP Services Network (MSPSN) sometime the week of January 18. Here’s background about the deal. And stay tuned: I hear some strategic partnership contracts involving other MSP-centric companies could get signed this weekend. (My cell phone’s on; call me when the ink dries…)
5. Confirmed: We’ll announce the third annual MSPmentor 100 results during a Webcast on February 10. The research report will debut shortly thereafter.
4. Worth Reading: Will Scott, director of worldwide managed services business development at Cisco Systems, has launched his own blog (outside of Cisco) to help stir conversation and education among managed and cloud services companies.
3. Online Backup Showdown?: Considering the following… Intronis, the online backup provider, is partnering with a range of RMM and PSA platform providers. Meanwhile, RMM provider Kaseya is preparing its own online backup service for the Kaseya 2 launch in late January 2010. Is the line between RMM and online backup blurring?
2. SaaS Goes Big In Small Business: Thirty percent of SMBs plan to leverage SaaS solutions in 2010, up from 22 percent in 2009 and 14 percent in 2008, according to a CompTIA survey. Impressive… but the numbers seem low to me. Didn’t those companies use a SaaS system to fill out the online survey?
1. Microsoft System Center: This week’s Microsoft-HP partnership announcement was short on details and long on rhetoric. But multiple readers tell me to keep a close eye on how HP leverages Microsoft’s System Center platform. I’ve never quite figured out why Microsoft hasn’t pushed System Center deeper into the MSP market… Keep an eye on HP’s moves with the Microsoft tool…
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Posted In: Mergers & Acquisions | On Premise | Professional Services Automation (PSA) | Remote Monitoring & Management Software | Sales | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
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Regarding #1 in your list… The MS System Center architecture does not lend itself well to an MSP’s multitenant business model, in my opinion that’s a prime reason for its poor adoption; this speculation is based on my own personal research. I’ve found that for System Center to work in an MSP’s business a costly instance of System Center Essentials ($3K per instance w/ SQL Server configured) has to be installed at each customer location (agent software is installed on each managed device at additional per unit cost). The added cost of the SCE instances is likely pushed to the customer hence reducing MSP margins; this should be tough to swallow given MS environments are increasingly commoditized. Further, an instance of System Center Operations Center (SCOM) has to be installed at the MSP’s central location. Then a piece of service provider gateway software (called ‘Service Provider Management Pack’) has to be installed to connect the SCE instances to the SCOM instance. This combined set of software for MSPs = SCROM or System Center Remote Operations Manager. This kludge architecture is a long shot away from the elegant plug-and-play, cost-effective, MSP-ready solutions that you get from the well established RMM tool providers. To further complicate the Systems Center architecture (challenging MSP customer deployments further), their [dumb] Linux and UNIX agent is developed outside of the standard SC code base and as a result requires special handling to get it operating properly. My research also shows limitations in monitoring scalability. In a recent Nimsoft blog posting (http://www.nimsoft.com/blogs/?p=567) it was noted that Microsoft was the number one most replaced monitoring solution by Nimsoft in 2009, with HP coming in second place. I’d caution MSPs to consider carefully before leveraging Systems Center software that is bundled into HP servers, it could drag their service delivery operations.
Hey Ken: I’ve never used Microsoft System Center so I’m not in a position to point out pros/cons. But it’s interesting to see SQL Server mentioned in the mix.
In the 1990s, Microsoft designed most of its server apps to leverage/require SQL Server — a pretty good move at the time since VARs wanted simplicity and integration. Plus, SQL Server was less expensive than Unix database alternatives.
Fast forward to the present and everybody seems to be kicking the tires on MySQL, etc. So suddenly, the SQL Server requirement can also be a burden these days…
-jp