MSPmentor’s 2012 Platinum Sponsors contribute timely insights through our guest blogging system. Our guest bloggers avoid the temptation to give you sales pitches, and instead share key observations to help you evolve, build and grow your managed services practices.
Look, I know you’re all IT people. You like bits and bytes, speeds and feeds. But if English majors have to learn enough math to balance their checkbooks, IT folks should learn enough grammar to be able to answer the following question: What’s the antonym to downtime? I’ll give you a clue – it’s something every person who uses technology hopes for.
I know what you’re thinking: Consumerism? Have you lost your mind? No, but I do want you to consider the positive impact consumerism can have on your business when it comes to cloud adoption.
In today’s changing IT landscape, the need for service providers to differentiate offerings from their peers is now more important and competitive than ever. Further, the average SMB’s network is becoming more and more sophisticated due in large part to the rapid adoption rates of migrating to cloud and virtual environments. We have noticed that one of the current significant trends in networking right now appears to be infrastructure virtualization and its impact on networking. Here’s why.
It is absolutely amazing how fast a year can fly by, and for many, my guess is this year has gone by much faster than some. As someone who attends quite a few trade events on an annual basis, I have the opportunity to sit down face to face with a host of MSPs and resellers who are moving towards the MSP model, and the dichotomy of success is amazing to me. Now, let’s look back… and ahead.
The quest to improve the productivity and efficiency of IT organizations is an ongoing one. With the arrival and rapid adoption of virtualization and cloud infrastructure in the recent years, IT organizations worldwide are starting to realize significant economy-of-scale benefits. Reduction in costs for ‘incremental units’ of computing power, the ability to more easily flex up and down as needed, and the lack of restrictions imposed by the traditional models, will all drive a dramatic increase in the consumption of computing and application resources as organizations are freed up to do more. However, with this benefit comes the added burden of high administration overhead from managing a virally sprawling & dynamic IT environment.
IT service providers that have been selling cloud-based business continuity solutions surely have noticed data backup and recovery is one of the most popular cloud-based offerings with end users. In fact, according to a recent study by CompTIA, storage and backup solutions are the most popular cloud applications, with 71 percent of small and midsize businesses (SMB) currently using the technology. The data points don’t end there.
What’s worse: A hurricane or a hard drive soaking in coffee? An early season blizzard that knocks out power lines or the dreaded blue screen of death? I suppose it depends on your perspective. But if you’re like most MSPs with whom I meet, a hard drive steeped in coffee or the blue screen of death seem worse than a “little weather.”
We’ve all seen the ads. Match.com can be a great place to meet that special someone – maybe even your spouse or partner. But what the ads don’t disclose is all the time, effort and misses that led up to that “perfect match.” On the personal level, it’s all worth it, but in the business world, who has the time, energy or money to throw at relationships that just aren’t going to pan out?! My point is this – when it comes to selecting a business partner, especially for high-profile, game-changing technologies like cloud, a few clicks of the mouse aren’t going to cut it.
Maybe you thought the Red Sox and the Braves were going to hit it out of the park last month. But, as I write this, the wild card-winning Cardinals are battling the Rangers in the World Series. Baseball’s unpredictable like that, you never know who is going to step up and drive in the game-winning run.
There are MSPs out there who continue to grow their businesses and they all seem to share two characteristics: a relentless focus on providing stellar customer service while also maintaining an eye on their bottom line. It’s a tough balancing act, and getting tougher as the companies MSPs serve (and MSPs themselves) scrutinize every penny of spending and find ways to optimize and increase cost efficiencies. Only MSPs who are delivering more value than the other guy – and can also do more with less – are going to thrive long-term.
Last week was a pretty interesting time in the channel and, as usual, much of the interesting news was announced at SMB Nation. Some of it was made publicly, and some of it was not. What were some of the interesting trends — and the potential implications for MSPs? Read on.
Over the past few years we have seen significant growth in MSP activity, fueled by continued emphasis on outsourcing by enterprises, increased adoption of IT infrastructure services, and emergence of specialized software service providers. In contrast, the overall global economic picture has recently become less rosy, given postponement of investments by organizations in light of uncertainty, the curtailment of spending by governments to reign in spiraling deficits, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, and the gloomy consumer sentiment in the US. Should MSPs be concerned?
Innovation drives the technology industry — and your business. But when you’re developing new cloud services and managed services, you’ve got to carefully weigh a range of factors. “Battles are won or lost even before they are fought,” goes an old saying. The success or failure of a new cloud service or managed service is quite predictable through certain parameters. Here are a few factors that affect the success or failure of your original ideas.
As a managed IT services provider, it’s important for your team to have strategic consulting skills and effective processes, which ultimately lift sales. Think about the following words: Proficiency. Expertise. Talent. Skill. Art. Knowledge is power. Working with the most knowledgeable and talented people on the planet is a great way to relieve stress, move your business forward, and sleep well at night. As a business owner, working with experts whose expertise and integrity you trust is a truly magical experience. Check the box, move on to the next problem. These guys have my back.
All the talk about the cloud over the past couple of years has obscured managed services to some extent. However, the managed services market remains in high-growth mode, and MSPs looking to increase revenues should be working hard to recruit new customers. But you’re going to need to do some education along the way.
If you had a job where you had to report to — gasp, a boss — you would manage that relationship, doing what we in corporate America call “managing up.” You’d make sure that you knew what your boss thought and what affected her decision to give you a raise. You’d also make sure you could do everything within your power to make your boss’ job easier so that you were considered a valuable asset to both your manager and the company. As an MSP, you must manage up, too. Here’s how.
Compared to a lot of businesses, Nimsoft (my employer) is in a unique position in that we sell to two core markets, with hundreds of enterprise customers and hundreds of MSP customers. Over the course of my eight years with the company, I’ve worked quite a bit with executives in both markets, and that vantage point has helped me gain some insights into what makes a successful MSP/client relationship.
MSPs by and large fared well after the 2008 banking crisis that sent the economy into a dive. Many customers saw managed services as way to control IT costs at a time they needed to tighten budgets. As the economy potentially heads for another slide, you have to wonder what the effect will be on providers of managed services and cloud services. Presumably, since clients have become dependent on remote monitoring and management to keep their daily operations running smoothly, you wouldn’t expect MSPs to suffer terribly from the second half of a double-dip recession.
Successful selling requires an understanding of the buyer’s mind, and most MSPs fail to develop a clear understanding of their customer’s true needs. Specifically, many MSPs don’t understand why buyers do — or don’t — buy from them. Great businesses take the time to understand their buyer’s psyche. Let’s delve a little deeper.
Welcome to Part III of the series, The ABC’s of Managed Services, focused on B for Backup, including cloud backup and online backup services. As some of you undoubtedly know, I work for Intronis. This blog, however, is more about building a backup and disaster recovery practice, and less about the specific tools you use to get there.
Selling isn’t easy. However, if you adopt a systematic approach, support new technologies, and offer best-of-the-class services, you can really accelerate your sales. The following five points provide insights into such things and help you win new customers.
If you haven’t been following the debate on BYOD – Bring Your Own Device – you soon will. The debate was inspired by the proliferation of $300 netbooks four years ago. Managed service providers were successful, for the most part, in keeping those consumer devices off the corporate network due to lack of security, manageability as well as raw horsepower.
There are a lot of acronyms in our world: MSP, SMB, SOHO, VM, RAM, ROM, LMNOP. (Heh, I’m just making sure you’re paying attention on that last one.) The whole acronym world salad gets a little crazy sometimes. At Intel, too, someone is always tossing out some new acronym that is supposed to be better and faster than just speaking in plain sentences.
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