During an interview at mindSHIFT‘s Long Island offices yesterday, CEO Paul Chisholm revealed his top priorities for the rest of 2011. More managed services acquisitions? More cloud marketing? Instead of guessing simply read on for a recap of my conversation with Chisholm.
The conversation covered…
1. Four Key Priorities:
- Strengthening mindSHIFT’s image and branding. A new corporate web site is set to go live on or about Monday, June 20. The site will promote mindSHIFT’s expertise in cloud computing, outsourcing and delivering IT peace of mind to customers.
- Continuing to expand mindSHIFT’s cloud services business — including some sort of virtual desktop announcement that’s coming soon. (mindSHIFT is among a handful of companies that have landed on our annual MSPmentor 100 and Talkin’ Cloud 50 lists, respectively).
- Continuing to seek new approaches to efficiency and automation.
- Cross-selling between mindSHIFT’s various business groups.
2. Cloud and managed services perspectives: Chisholm thinks the cloud wave will build faster than the original managed services wave, though he said cloud computing will continue to require plenty of customer education.
“Since Microsoft, Amazon and other big companies are talking about the cloud I do think that gives cloud computing a blessing of sorts as a legitimate technology,” said Chisholm. But, he adds, mindSHIFT won’t paint cloud as perfect. Nothing in IT, he notes, runs without an occasional hiccup though he says cloud services for the most part are incredibly reliable.
“We don’t want customers to think they have to hand over all of their applications,” said Chisholm. “Perhaps they want to put Exchange in the cloud first; you don’t have to give us every application to gain the benefits of the cloud.”
Chisholm expects cloud and managed services to blur over time. But mindSHIFT draws a line between the two approaches. For instance, managing a co-location server is managed services rather than a true cloud solution. To gain cloud momentum, mindSHIFT will continue to focus on hosted Exchange, cloud backup, VoIP services, and the legal vertical with a specific cloud application for attorneys.
3. mindSHIFT’s View of Microsoft Office 365: “You can’t stick your head in the sand when Microsoft talks about low-priced services and the cloud,” said Chisholm. “There’s a place for Office 365 but what are you buying in terms of service? There will always be a place in the market for service providers like us.”
4. Recent and Future Acquisitions:
- mindSHIFT acquired Alpheon, a healthcare-centric MSP, earlier this year. Chisholm said the deal has worked out well. he confirmed that former Alpheon CEO Greg Donovan left mindSHIFT after three months but the separation decision was professional and mutual, Chisholm noted. Alpheon veterans like David Sturdivant have marched forward with mindSHIFT, Chisholm added.
- mindSHIFT also acquired ORBIT Systems earlier this year, primarily to make a geographic play in the midwest and also Arizona. “Of all the deals we’ve done, ORBIT is the one that most mirrors us in terms of services and our vision for the cloud,” said Chisholm.
- mindSHIFT hears about two new potential M&A targets per week but doesn’t investigate all of them. Some are too small; others rely too heavily on consulting revenues. And near term, Chisholm says mindSHIFT doesn’t expect to close any new deals within the next few months.
5. Funding and Venture Capital: Yes, mindSHIFT is venture capitalist funded. But mindSHIFT’s VCs aren’t looking for a fast exit. Also, mindSHIFT does not need to raise more capital. “None of our investors want or need to exit,” said Chisholm. He said the VCs won’t be involved forever, and perhaps a new investor will step in at some point if one of the VCs wants to step out. But overall, reading Chisholm’s body language and listening to his words, it sounds like mindSHIFT’s financial backers are content for the long haul.
That’s all for now. We’ll be back with a look at the new mindSHIFT web site as soon as it goes live on or about June 20, 2011.
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Posted In: Branding | Finance | Marketing | MSP Mergers and Acquisitions | Sales
Tags: Cloud Services Branding | Managed Services Branding | Managed services sales | mindSHIFT | Office 365 | Paul Chisholm
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Take a look at our 
Pauls priorities should be,
Customer Service. Its simple. Take care of your clients or they post about how inept the support is. It certainly isnt fanatical like a certain competitor.
Another could be, transparency. Before you move your business or build your MSP via a Mindshift offering (or any other), find out how to reach management if there is an issue. The SOP at Groupspark (A Mindshift company) seems to be “Sorry I cant put you in touch with management.”
Quite frankly Mindshift may be a great company and my judgement is clouded by Groupspark, the hosted exchange part of it. However, they are still a Mindshift company and part of the collective so I have to imagine that the same processes are used throughout the company.
I would email Paul directly, but there is no way to reach him (For paying clients anyway).
Do your research before putting your clients data and your reputation in any 3rd party solution.
Charles: I think you hit a key point for all MSPs… Customer service is a diffentiator. On the GroupSpark front I have some strong opinions. I’m aware that at least major distributor distanced itself from GroupSpark a year or two ago because of some issues with hosted Exchange. But I do hear that GroupSpark’s service has improved over the past year or so. I don’t want to sugarcoat the situation: Yes, I think GroupSpark hit some bumps. But I think those bumps were potentially addressed over the past year.
In terms of Paul and mindSHIFT being accessible/available: When I need to reach a CEO at any major company I simply dial the main switchboard. From there, it’s easy to judge who is responsive and who would rather not talk. I’ve always found Paul and mindSHIFT to be responsive, though I realize I’m with the media and not an MSP or end-customer.
-jp
Joe,
I have been a customer with Groupspark for the past month or two, so I am not sure about the earlier issues. However the past week or so have been very frustrating.
Now due to this post, Paul has contacted me directly and we spoke this morning allowing me to give him (I Hope) an understanding of the events that have led up to my post. To his credit he did do what was needed to track me down, and let me vent. I still stand by my original post and as you said, these points should be kept in mind for MSP customers regardless of vendor.
While I am here on my soapbox, if any other MSP Vendor is paying attention, there needs to be transparency into the processes that you use to support our clients. Give me a portal that shows me the status of my ticket because when my client asks me for an update I don’t want to have to call yet another phone jockey to get information or to find out the ticket was closed(!). This isnt rocket surgery! Give me a blog about how you setup a fake test company and experienced your processes for yourself, and made changes to address shortcomings. Please for the love of all that is holy don’t make me scour the internet through marketing fluff and all manner of trollop to find info that I should have had on your website in the first place.
Or skip that and model yourself after Zappos.
And Joe, my attempt at going through the switchboard failed as well. I was directed to sales. Hopefully changes will be made and people will be trained. In the mean time, Groupspark has earned my business for now.
Charles,
Thanks for looping back and updating the conversation. I’ve always found Paul Chisholm to be responsive, so I’m not surprised that he personally contacted you. Please keep us posted as you continue to evaluate your partner ecosystem.
-jp
MindShift appears to be a company run by insurance people. As soon as the contract is signed, you supposedly have an account manager who is doing your bidding and helping you with your IT needs, but the reality is that he will almost never call you to offer suggestions for improving your process etc. He does not really think with you. We have been a long term customer in Morrisville,NC, but I was almost never contacted by their account manager to suggest ways to stay up to date. The main focus appears to be collecting on the monthly invoices. We had a few support issues and it was obvious that the helpdesk people did not really know our server configuration. One of them even suggested that it was his time to go home for the weekend and that we should reboot our particular server ourselves. If he had known our configuration he would have known that we did not have that capability, why did we call him in the first place?
The first time this glaring support issue happened we got contacted by their ‘higher management’ and they assured us that they would fix their procedures. But then the problem happened again, and I got another call from the same guy, I guess he wanted to explain why he did not fix the problem the first time. It was too late then. Then recently we found out that our SAN was not even covered by their maintenance contract, even though it is a vital part of our equipment that has been there from the beginning. Imagine finding out in the middle of the night that your equipment is not covered for repair, that sounds like what a typical insurance company would do.
Then at some point they urged us to move from our existing data center to another, I guess they had a better relationship with the other company. They even told lies about our existing data center, that it was under powered and less reliable. That was a self-serving lie as I recently found out.
I guess it is easy to build an empire on automating customer solutions, writing self-serving contracts, collecting monthly fees (their invoicing is top notch, always on time) and avoiding any personal contact, but we prefer a more dedicated approach.
Ex-Mindshift customer.
Joop: Can you disclose your name and company affiliation? We welcome reader feedback and constructive criticism. But generally speaking we don’t permit anonymous posts that criticize a company if we can’t fact-check the info or verify the poster information.
-jp