MSPmentor

Joe’s recent blog entry — asking whether MSPs were killing their own margins — touches on one of the most widely held misperceptions in the business.

The growth of the managed services model has always been accompanied by the specter of commoditization and the related “race to the bottom” discussion. But on the contrary. the race will be to the top. Here’s why. Read More >

It wasn’t long ago that adopting managed services was a considered to be a pretty scary proposition. You had to build a NOC (whatever a NOC is – but we will leave that to another discussion), spend $50,000 (U.S. dollars) or more on software, turn your business upside down (or go out of business in case you missed the point!), move from low-risk time and materials to high-risk fixed price billing, replace most of your sales team and technicians and of course obey the obligatory command to “fire your customers” that enjoyed the old way of doing business with you.

Fortunately the meaning of “managed services” has changed, and changed for the better. Here’s how. Read More >

SaaS (software as a service) and managed services are often mentioned in the same breath as though they were part of some collective goodness, but for many MSPs they have actually been more like mortal enemies.

In fact most MSPs have focused almost exclusively on the bread and butter servers, desktops, networks and applications that reside within the walls of their SMB customers. If SaaS was considered at all it was generally seen as a threat that would hopefully just go away if ignored long enough.

One result is that SaaS vendors have made very little headway in the channel. Selling SaaS has often been viewed by the channel as the equivalent of selling their birthright. With visions of all those shiny servers that have kept them alive through good times and bad for the last 20 years suddenly disappearing off into the cloud.

However, the huge NetSuite IPO (initial public offering) proves that SaaS is not going away. Now even Microsoft’s Small Business Server is being delivered as a hosted service in the cloud. The money is beginning to flow into SMB SaaS and the MSPs need to deal with it. Here’s how. Read More >