Now, back to the story. Best Buy. There are, unfortunately, SMBs that will flock to the service. Until something really goes wrong. Or until they really need a refresh, and don’t want to be sold a product they don’t need. Or until a new technology hits the business market and competitors are leveraging it.

Congrats to LogMeIn on the Best Buy deal, and best of luck to the GeekSquad in your dealings with the 9 trillion home users and home businesses (read: single computer, very needy) users you’ll attract.

Those who survive will grow, and most will likely outgrow your services. We’ll remember to thank you for making them aware of managed services in the first place….

Jim Van
Logicomm, Inc.
http://www.logicomm-inc.com

There are three components that must all function together for a service provider to be successful: people, processes, and technology. So yes, LMI is great but you better have the right people, following the right processes, using it!

Edward Stringfellow
CEO/Founder
http://www.stringfellow.com

Best Buy does have “special agents” in pilot locations and that program has been expanding. With all of their hardware margins slashed they will be looking at service to survive the next decade.

@Bob you make an excellent point and I believe that the great “land grab” in managed services is still ahead of us.

@Joe it will would be great if Dell would respond to you regarding their program. It is the most significant push I am aware of on a large scale. I saw in your recent post you are still knocking at the door and we all appreciate it!

It’s really easy to differentiate the two. Do they provide a technology budget and steering process? No. Do they demonstrate where you are in relation to industry standards? No. Do they support all of your technology, not just the common stuff? No. Do they work to streamline your technology so that you don’t have to call them with issues? No. They only answer the phone when you call.

Someone, someday, is going to figure out how to leverage the large organizations for common support tasks (answer the phone, general desktop issues, monitoring, patch management, etc.) and weave that into their broader Managed Services offering. To date, there hasn’t been a large amount of success from the companies that are doing it. The problem is how do you take something that is a key relationship point for your business and outsource it to a company that doesn’t understand your clients needs? The company that figures that out has a lot of running room in the Managed Services industry.

Bob Penland
CTO
TruMethods
http://www.trumethods.com

Intel’s RPAT support from vPro is super easy to integrate with logmein products, so a customer with a boot error can do a 3 finger solute (ctrl alt f2) to open a remote support session in Logmein Rescue or Logmein Pro. Does any other RMM tool out there today even have bare metal remote control support?

Logmein Ignition and Central are excellent compliments to the FREE version of Logmein.

Above all the actual remote session is by far the best RMM experience on the market.

The chat feature negates the need for a phone call and allows techs to work on multiple issues.

~Andy

P.S. I have a former client (school system) with 4,000 FREE nodes and a few $30/year Ingition licenses, and the $300/year Central license and they can get into a machine in less than 5 seconds flat to remote assist. They are using some inexpensive automation/monitoring tool whose escapes me at the moment.