MSPmentor » Guest Bloggers

How to Hire Brilliant People

Axcient Guest Blog — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:30:51 +0000

With continued growth and competition in the managed services market, MSPs that want to stay competitive can’t afford to make big hiring mistakes. The wrong employee can quickly drain business resources and affect morale. Every business occasionally has a hire that doesn’t work out for one reason or another, but it’s worth putting extra effort in the hiring process to avoid having this happen repeatedly.

There are basic steps every business takes to find the right talent, like having a great recruiter, maximizing use of LinkedIn and other online tools, setting up referral bonuses, maintaining a great work environment, and so on. But there are two additional guidelines that I have found to be essential for bringing the right people on board. These include…

1. Only hire value/culture fits

When you are interviewing talented prospective employees, it might be hard to turn down a competent, industry-proven individual just because he or she is not a good fit with your company values and company. But do it anyway. You aren’t hiring a resume; you’re hiring a person. Someone who doesn’t appear to fit in during an interview won’t fit in with your customers, co-workers, or business principles.

I expanded on the importance of having strong corporate values and how it affects hiring, in a recent interview with Inc. Magazine writer Jessica Stillman, which was published in the article: “Business Essential You Might Be Missing.”

In the businesses I’ve built and managed, I’ve found this: When an organization has strong values and each employee is matched with those values, the team becomes a collective force with an impact that is three, four, or five times the value of each individual themselves. Hiring those who exemplify your company’s values and culture is the most powerful weapon for finding and retaining top talent that will perform to the top of their ability. It’s so important to me that I personally interview each new hire.

2. Look beyond your industry

There’s definitely something to be said for industry knowledge. Prospective sales hires who already understand the MSP business model, for example, will have a shorter learning curve in their ability to communicate the value of managed services to customers. But don’t be afraid to hire someone from a different industry who shows aptitude and an ability to learn quickly.

Occasionally you’ll find a very smart individual and great cultural fit who doesn’t have specific domain knowledge or experience. This could be a political science graduate who just “gets” marketing, or a musical theater performer who shows promise in a sales appointment-setting role. While such candidates may require a bit more training or ramp-up time, they are often the employees that bring the freshest perspective and most unique approach to the job. And ultimately, you should be hiring talent over experience if you want to build a sustainable and leading company, because talent will over trump experience over time.

Beyond performing due diligence to screen for value/culture fits and general aptitude, what should be done if a hire doesn’t work out? The answer is simple, albeit not easy for some – you must manage that person out of the business.

Retaining an employee who turns out to be the wrong fit is a disservice both to the business and to that employee, and ending the relationship swiftly is the best way to remain true to them both.

Justin Moore is CEO of Axcient, which works closely with MSPs and VARs. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Axcient’s guest blogs here.

Cloud SLAs: Is There A Rainbow on the Horizon?

Vikas Aggarwal — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:30:19 +0000

At the MSPWorld trade show at Miami last week, attendees asked how to hold their cloud provider responsible for slow application performance. Also, attendees wanted to know how to avoid the next catastrophic outage and ensure the SLAs penalized the cloud provider for missing promised targets.

Hmm, is the cloud service provider really responsible for your application’s performance in the Cloud?

Maybe its your network or Internet provider.
Perhaps the DNS service provided by your friendly domain registrar.
Or could the issue involve a slow CRM API provided by another SaaS provider that your application interfaces with?

One thing became pretty obvious from the active panel discussion and the audience: Trying to create an SLA with so many interdependent components and so many owners is not trivial. Worse – there is no obligation today for the different providers to share any data on their IaaS or PaaS performance, even if this data is available to them.

While selecting a cloud provider of any kind, you will need to get transparency of their service performance metrics, and availability of their performance metrics using APIs. The performance of their infrastructure is not as relevant as performance of the service they are providing — they might have redundancy and other design elements that might not impact their service even if their infrastructure fails, so getting their infrastructure performance metrics might not be relevant.

You will also need a monitoring platform that has open APIs to aggregate the performance data from different cloud providers and gives you a composite metric mapping into the performance of your service. And finally, your monitoring platform has to be able to provide a service oriented view of these performance metrics and not just traditional metrics like CPU and memory.

As more enterprises move to cloud based services and infrastructure, their desire to work with a single vendor will force them to gravitate towards “cloud service aggregators” — a single vendor aggregating services from various cloud providers. However, the enterprises will demand SLAs from the aggregate providers, and this will require some way to identify the responsible partner for failed SLAs or outages. There will be a need to get automated performance and SLA metrics from different downstream partners and correlate this data to provide aggregate SLAs for the enterprise. This requires transparency in operations, open APIs and uniform SLA measurements, and even though not prevalent today, this will become a necessity in the near future.

Vikas Aggarwal is CEO of Zyrion Inc., a provider of Cloud and Application Performance Monitoring software for large to mid enterprises and Service Providers. You can read more about Zyrion’s monitoring solution here. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmntor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

Can You Build Your Own Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution?

Datto Guest Blog — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:30:12 +0000

I’ll be the first to point out that there are numerous backup/disaster recovery/business continuity vendors in the channel right now, and choosing a solution that can satisfy all of your customers’ needs is a difficult task. When the abundance of choice is coupled with dissatisfaction from previous vendors, this can lead many MSPs into thinking it will be easier and more cost effective to build their own backup solution.

There are many things to consider if you are serious about putting together your own business continuity solution. Below is a graphic outlining the different building blocks that makeup a complete business continuity solution. Successful business continuity vendors are able to seamless integrate diverse technologies to create a single integrated solution. Failing to build a reliable solution can rapidly create a management and/or legal nightmare.

MSPs are certainly capable of building their own solutions, but do not always realize the cost of assembling, managing and maintaining these custom solutions. The total cost of ownership (TCO) argument is one you definitely need to pay attention to. Not only will building your own solution be a huge time investment, but will also require constant development to keep up with advances in technology. Don’t underestimate the amount of time you will spend creating and managing custom solutions.

You also need to consider that 3^rd party vendors operate on a scale advantage when it comes to storing data. For example, adding the 6,000,001^st GB of data to Datto’s cloud is far more cost effective than an MSP adding their 5^th GB. At nine cents per gig, Datto has one of the lowest cost per gig off-site storage rates in the industry.

Liability is another concern to factor into the equation. When you build your own cloud, you assume 100% responsibility for the data. Building your own cloud is difficult and requires a lot of expertise. Also, many backup vendors are aware of HIPPA, SOX, PCI, etc., requirements, and tailor their solutions to ensure compliance. When you choose to build a solution on your own you run the risk of running into the vendor blame game, going it your own means that you are taking on 100% of the responsibility.

At the end of the day, building, managing and maintaining business continuity solutions are not what MSPs specialize in. A MSPs core business is to provide their clients with the best technology and the highest level of service, all for an affordable rate. Every hour that’s put into a project of this scale is an hour that is not being dedicated to servicing existing clients or searching for new ones.

Business continuity vendors, like Datto, have already done much of the work when it comes to designing a complete and robust solution. MSPs can leverage Datto’s advanced technology and industry expertise to provide their clients with the best solution possible at an affordable price point.

So before you make the leap into creating your own backup solution, assess each of the building blocks of business continuity and make sure you have a solid plan of action. If the endeavor becomes too costly or time consuming, have no fear, Datto is here.

Shannon Kohn is marketing and channel relations director at Datto Inc., a storage specialist that works closely with MSPs. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Datto’s guest blogs here.

Do Your Customers Trust That You Deliver Value?

CentraStage Guest Blog — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:30:27 +0000

Anyone going to be buying Facebook shares? I think I might – if only because it will be THE cool icebreaker for the next few months. What’s not to like. But a $100 billion valuation? That’s a big number – even in America where a billion is not quite what it is here in Europe. Where does that value come from and how do we trust that it’s for real?

Friends, customers, suppliers – a large part of the relationships we develop depend upon perceived value and trust and for most companies the marketing challenge is where to sit on the value-trust seesaw. Facebook leans towards value; their emphasis is on growing their user base by increasing the benefits that their users enjoy. They tend to talk publicly about trust only when security issues threaten growth. Banks tend to leverage trust; we’ll pay slightly higher fees if we’re sure our money is safe. It’s a simplistic view, but it’s one worth considering when positioning your own business.

Here at CentraStage we’re pretty much on the value side of things. Don’t get me wrong – security is core to what we do – but as a relative newcomer in a specialized market we know we have to earn your trust and that takes time. So right now we’re adding features and lowering the cost to entry as we build up our customer base and earn our stripes. It is the consistent message across all our public imagery. We want to be seen as the new kid on the block.

The downside is that you can often be overlooked in larger opportunities where trust plays a bigger role. In these cases it is important to be able to separate your corporate brand from the individuals that make up a company. Make sure your clients understand that difference. Your company has a youthful and can-do brand but you are a serious and trusted business person. Your company offers discounts and slashes prices but you work to time honored industry standards. It’s an important distinction to be observed by everyone in your business.

Value the business, trust the individuals. It doesn’t matter how many likes or connections happen daily on Facebook, the real question is can we trust the team behind the business to deliver $100bn of value? It’s an interesting question for all of us.

Ian van Reenen is CTO CentraStage, which works closely with MSPs. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of CentraStage’s guest blogs here.

Why Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service?

EVault Guest Blog — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:30:27 +0000

Data is the lifeblood of any organization, and its loss can be a serious blow to the business. If your systems and data are not adequately protected and supported by a well-tested disaster recovery plan, chances are that you are placing your organization at risk.

Forrester analyst Rachel Dines recently discussed DRaaS in an article for ComputerWorld UK. In it, she stated:

“DRaaS has the potential to make your DR implementations less expensive and more automated. Enterprises should be taking a close look at their open-systems business-critical (i.e., Tier II or mid-tier) applications to see if they would be a good candidate for DRaaS. DRaaS most likely won’t work for all of your applications, but it can be a powerful tool in your continuity portfolio.”

As Dines reported, DRaaS is a compelling approach for protecting your systems and data. It offers numerous benefits that far outweigh the earlier strategies mentioned.

For one, it is more dependable and easier to manage than a tape-based solution. If your tapes are near the disaster, they are subject to the same risks as your primary site. If they are far away, you’ll have RTO issues. On the other hand, DRaaS is usually based on infrastructure that leverages virtualization to protect systems and data across geographic risk zones. By leveraging the cloud as a remote recovery site, an organization is protected against disaster at home. You can reconstruct your network and keep the service running remotely as long as it takes you to rebuild your own facility.

Some DR alternatives require costly duplication of your entire infrastructure in a second location. This approach can also involve many servers, so time restraints typically cause IT technicians to test only a handful of them. On the other hand, virtualized environments have far fewer provisioning and hardware requirements, so IT can test the entire system to ensure every aspect is working optimally. However not all recovery in the cloud services are the same. If your organization lacks disaster recovery expertise in house, then look for a managed service offering that provides a team of disaster recovery experts to provision, configure and test the DR infrastructure with you. And if disaster strikes, a remote DR service team would be unaffected by your disaster, and can guide and manage the recovery process for you.

With DRaaS, you will likely recover more quickly too. A report from the Aberdeen Group (“Small and Mid-Sized Organizations Gain Disaster Recovery Advantages Using Cloud Storage”) revealed that organizations with a formal disaster recovery plan that used cloud storage in that plan found that they recovered from downtime events almost four times faster than those that did not use cloud storage in their disaster recovery plan.

That’s a pretty compelling time advantage.

Terry Cunningham is president and GM of EVault, the online backup provider. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all EVault guest blogs here.

2012: End of the World — Or End of the World As We Know It?

PacketTrap MSP Guest Blog — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:01:54 +0000

For those of us that don’t think the world will end in December 2012, this month will bring about a time for Managed Service Providers to do some strategic planning, identifying business goals and outlining ways to accomplish company-wide initiatives. Technology seems to be evolving at an accelerated pace, bringing about both challenges and opportunities for MSPs. Since increasing revenue is likely a business goal for most companies, it’s important to think about ways to leverage IT environment changes in order to offer new services. To do so, let’s first evaluate two trends likely to impact every managed service provider.

They include…

Cloudy with a Chance of Opportunity – Why We Shouldn’t Fear the Unknown

Last year brought the introduction of many new cloud services from a variety of different technology vendors, from startups to long-standing technology leaders launching cloud tools. The explosive growth of the cloud computing market and availability of new solutions is a result of end user organization demand. Market dynamics, lower budgets and the wide-spread ‘do more with less’ mentality, dictate organizations’ need to explore moving to the cloud, mainly for tangible cost savings. Email, word processing, collaboration and a variety of other mission-critical applications move off-premise. While end user organizations begin to understand the value cloud-based applications and services can deliver, they will expect availability, security and performance to remain. For MSPs, with cloud computing adoption comes a real opportunity to customize service offerings that will support their clients’ cloud deployments.

As MSPs develop (and price) service offerings that include cloud-based applications or infrastructure, there are a few things to keep in mind; end user organizations need full service, 24×7 network monitoring, including monitoring of critical elements like traffic flow and bandwidth, if they are accessing applications and data from the cloud.

B.Y.O.D. – Yes, We Know, Your Employees Want to Use their iPhone.

Even more so than cloud computing, the proliferation of smartphones and mobile devices like tablets is significantly impacting the corporate IT environment. Employees argue that bringing their own device into the corporate four walls will improve productivity. Many expect to access files and applications anywhere, on any device: At home on the couch on an iPad, in the airport on an Android, at a remote office on a Macbook and so on.

The consumerization of IT, be it the availability of mobile devices at relatively low prices or using Web-based applications such as business tools, empower employees to bisect the IT department. This raises a huge red flag as access to corporate data and network vulnerability can be significantly compromised

As with cloud computing, the B.Y.O.D. is a trend that can’t be overlooked. Instead, MSPs are presented with another opportunity to expand their services through offering support to control and secure their customer’s IT environment. By incorporating mobile device management into their existing service model, MSP’s are able to put their client’s security concerns at ease.

MSPs can choose to be reactive or proactive regarding these two major emerging IT trends. The importance of differentiating their service offerings amongst competitors is so important, now especially more than ever. As we make our way into what we can only hope is a successful 2012, take some time to think about what your business is currently offering and how leveraging advancements in technology will assist in generating what we’re all after – growth!

For information about PacketTrap MSP, go to www.packettrap.com or email sales@packettrap.com. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmetnor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

MSPs: Communicate Value and Stop Focusing On Price

N-able Guest Blog — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:26:55 +0000

If a customer doesn’t see the business value in what you do, your services are expendable. It’s a harsh reality, but one that we all face. As an MSP, the challenge lies in communicating your customer value day-in and day-out. For most, promoting value at the front end of the sale to earn the customer’s business comes easy. But once the ink dries, many MSPs turn the focus to meeting the SLA (service level agreement) and recognizing the recurring revenue. The selling stops. The relationship is managed, but is the business still being earned and relationship nurtured?

Once a customer sees the ongoing stability of a remotely managed IT environment, some jump to the conclusion that all their technology headaches are gone, which can lead them to wonder what exactly they’re paying you for. It’s a legacy issue that MSPs must address early on through constant communication, strategic pricing and a clear demonstration of business value through smart reporting and quarterly or bi-monthly business reviews.

Steps to Success

Not sure how to combat this issue? Here are several do’s and don’ts gleaned from N-able’s MSP Elite:

Don’t productize your services and fixate on price. Posting a flat-rate service fee on your web site devalues and artificially commoditizes your services.
Do focus on customizing your value and the outcome for your clients by using technology to support your clients’ needs and business goals.
Don’t underestimate the customer experience and need for a personal touch. Going remote has its obvious advantage, but being seen and heard face-to-face remains critical. This is a relationship business.
Do establish a defendable and differentiated value proposition.
Don’t be afraid to walk away from a prospect or customer. If you’re not seeing eye-to-eye out the gate, just call it a day and move on. More than 80 percent of the market is unmanaged. Additional opportunity is out there.
Do become a valued business consultant as well as a technology provider. Listen to your clients and establish an ongoing meeting with a structured process about how technology and your services will, and are, supporting their business.
Don’t just send along a canned report that shows threats blocked, patched applied and servers fixed. Consistently track, report and celebrate what your team has accomplished. Customize the report to show how your efforts have met the customer’s needs and helped them achieve their goals. Reporting is going to be huge in 2012. From compliance to general accountability, reporting both on technology and business impact is going to be core to an MSPs’ service moving forward.
Do establish corporate values, technical processes and a signature of service that will ensure a positive customer experience and drive greater loyalty.
Don’t sell to anyone and everyone. Assess your portfolio and focus on the right clients. Understand who your target audience is, what they need and specialize your service to meet their needs.
Do have a plan. A one-page strategic plan will help keep your team focused and on track.

More Guidance

For additional insight, see the following partner video on value-based packaging, pricing and reporting, featuring insights from J. Michael Drake, CEO of masterIT, which has been an MSPmentor 100 company multiple times since 2008.

Another good resource is the recent report called “Countering Artificial Commoditization and Poor Pricing Practices in Managed Services,” written by The 2112 Group and sponsored by N-able and NetEnrich.

Mike Cullen is VP of sales at N-able Technologies, which develops remote monitoring and management automation solutions for MSPs and IT departments. Monthly guest blogs such as this are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

Four Steps to Cloud Services Success In 2012

Renee Bergeron — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:12:33 +0000

It will come as no surprise that we anticipate continuing — and explosive — cloud computing growth this year. What does surprise me is the number of resellers who remain unprepared to take advantage of this trend. As you hone your cloud strategy for 2012, keep in mind these four elements of a successful cloud plan.

1. Is your organization trained for cloud? Every person on your team must be ready and able to define cloud, and articulate the benefits of your particular cloud offering to your customers. Unsure how to tackle training? Most reputable cloud vendors, along with Ingram Micro, offer training geared toward setting your team at ease with the concept of cloud.

2. Have you overhauled your sales incentives? Not only is selling services and cloud computing a departure from traditional IT sales, you simply can’t incent your team the same as with hardware. Consider establishing a separate incentive and quota for selling cloud services, and pay upfront on the booking value instead of on the monthly revenue or margin.

3. Have you decided your role? There are two paths for cloud sales — a cloud broker or a cloud provider. The first entails partnering with a vendor and passing along its cloud service to your customers. The latter requires an investment into a cloud service that you will deliver directly to your customers. Look at your customer base, your own business, and pick a role before going any farther with your strategy.

4. Do you have the right partners in place? Regardless of your chosen cloud role, you need reliable and innovative vendor partners. You can gain a head start in this competitive market by leveraging vendor partners that have been vetted both financially and technically by an industry expert, such as Ingram Micro Cloud.

My best advice is to invest the time now to review your cloud preparedness level, and then continue to leverage industry partners to remain on the cutting edge of cloud technology developments as innovation continues around this game-changing technology.

Renee Bergeron is VP of managed services and cloud computing at Ingram Micro, overseeing such efforts as Ingram Micro Cloud. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual sponsorship program. Read all of Bergeron’s guest blogs here.

Recession Boosted Business Innovation for MSPs

Vikas Aggarwal — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:30:42 +0000

Agility, ability and velocity became the new success necessities of organizations in past few years, especially in just gone by 2011 driven largely by recession realities and unpredictable business environment. Recession, viewed positively (do we have a choice?), boosted innovation and increased the pace of new process development and its adoption forever. Both businesses and individuals are increasingly dependent on IT and the services provided by IT. The IT customer is increasingly global, the realm of the IT services grows larger every day and their dependency on sprawling, distributed components demands intelligent ways to manage and monitor this infrastructure.

The administrative burden for managing this burgeoning infrastructure will only increase for MSPs, unless they adopt processes and software to automate most of the burden. To automate processes, you need to integrate the different workflows seamlessly, which requires the software products to have flexible APIs. The order entry, provisioning, monitoring & billing workflows are all candidates for integration and automation. There have been significant advances even within the monitoring and management solutions to reduce the administrative burden with the use of templates, threshold baselining and creating of service models.

The other innovation has been in the field of data analytics. The IT customer’s demands have always been dynamic, and IT departments have reacted by provisioning for the peak demand, resulting in wasted idle resources. This is one of the key drivers for the adoption of cloud and virtualization – to take advantage of this excess idle capacity. But the usage of all IT components is dynamic, not just computing resources. Even the usage of application resources is dynamic by the hour and it is increasingly important for IT departments to understand the behavior pattern of their network and applications in addition to the computing resources. The number of users, the response times, the queued messages, the database query rate – all vary by time of day and understanding the usage pattern and deviations from it will help isolate the root cause of degradation in IT service performance much faster, and ultimately, higher customer satisfaction. More importantly, by using behavior patterns, this greatly reduces the amount of false alarms for IT Operations, and lower TCO.

Automation and Analytics are smart product features focusing on reducing the administrative burden in today’s distributed Cloud environments. Keeping MSP’s business necessities in mind, these innovative features are pragmatically relevant and a must for all MSPs in today’s business environment.

Three SMB Trends for 2012

Axcient Guest Blog — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:30:31 +0000

As a sales VP, it’s part of my job to look ahead and make predictions for the year. Based on my experience providing technology solutions to MSPs in the small and midsized businesses (SMB) space, I expect to see the following cloud-related storage trends accelerate in 2012.

The lineup includes…

1. Increased growth in SMB use of SaaS-based data storage

A growing number of SMBs are buying in to cloud technology. Deloitte’s most recent “Forecasting Change” report on Cloud Computing predicts the Software as a Service (SaaS) market will experience a year-over-year growth rate of more than 17% to reach a value of $17.8 billion in 2013. At the same time, SMBs find the amount of data they need to retain is increasing at a rapid rate. The growth of the digital universe as a whole more than doubles every year, now at around 2 zettabytes versus 1 zettabyte a year ago (IDC Digital Universe Study, 2011).

Regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, the OSH Act, and others have strict rules for SMBs when it comes to the secure backup and recovery of files, causing the amount of stored data to grow even faster.

Cloud-based SaaS applications for SMBs especially make sense in the area of data storage, where SMBs can get the level of reliability that was previously available only at “enterprise prices” at a price an SMB can afford. What’s more, cloud solutions give SMBs the scalability and flexibility they need, without having a lot of upfront costs or infrastructure to maintain.

2. Increased SMB demand for business continuity

SMBs today are more dependent on the uptime of their data and applications than ever. Think about your own expectations for your financial data, for example – you need the businesses managing your accounts to have your data accessible 24/7, and downed servers or power outages are not an excuse. You’ll find different service providers if the ones you have can’t deliver. SMBs that suffer even a few hours of downtime will lose customers and productivity fast, and at a high cost. To calculate the potential costs of lost business, see “How Much Downtime Can Your SMB Afford?”

In 2010, 30% of channel partners offered SaaS-based backup and business continuity solutions (AMI Partners U.S. SMB Channel Partners Annual Overview). But since then, technology has been introduced that enables MSPs to provide an affordable, all-in-one, cloud-based backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery solution to their clients. SMBs’ increased sense of need and the availability of the technology will drive more SMBs to adopt business continuity solutions in 2012.

3. Increase in MSPs and managed service offerings

As SMB demand for cloud-based backup and business continuity technology increases, so will the demand for managed service offerings. For most SMBs, it makes sense to pay a monthly fee to have all or some of their IT services taken care of so they can focus on their core business. And for many VARs, the allure of recurring monthly revenue will compel them to try adding managed services to their business model. Some predict this increased competition for managed service clients will lead to consolidation of MSPs. While some of that is bound to happen, there’s still a massive market for those who want to offer managed services for data storage and business continuity. The managed service model brings increased revenue, deeper customer relationships, improved defense against competition, and a greater return on invested capital. It’s a win-win for the customer and the provider.

These three trends tie together in a kind of trifecta for channel providers of cloud-based data storage and business continuity in 2012. With the rapid growth of SaaS-based data storage, the demand for and availability of business continuity technology, and the increased desire of channel partners to offer managed services – 2012 is sure to be a banner growth year for those involved in helping SMBs do away with downtime.

Chris Sterbenc is VP of sales at Axcient, which works closely with MSPs. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

MSPmentor » Guest Bloggers

How to Hire Brilliant People

1. Only hire value/culture fits

2. Look beyond your industry

Read More About This Topic

Cloud SLAs: Is There A Rainbow on the Horizon?

Read More About This Topic

Can You Build Your Own Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution?

Read More About This Topic

Do Your Customers Trust That You Deliver Value?

Read More About This Topic

Why Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service?

Read More About This Topic

2012: End of the World — Or End of the World As We Know It?

Read More About This Topic

MSPs: Communicate Value and Stop Focusing On Price

Steps to Success

More Guidance

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Four Steps to Cloud Services Success In 2012

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Recession Boosted Business Innovation for MSPs

Read More About This Topic

Three SMB Trends for 2012

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