MSPmentor

One of the best presentations on managed services I’ve ever read reached my inbox on April 10. It was sent by Joe Paquet, VP of vendor alliances and relations at Axis Business Solutions, an MSP in Portsmouth, N.H.

Paquet took the time to summarize key learnings from the MSPAlliance’s Managed Services Summit, held earlier this month in Atlanta. Slide after slide, he offers value tips to MSPs that want to get started in the business.

For instance, here are six ways MSPs can effectively acquire customers, according to Axis Business Solutions: Read More >

My email inbox today had a Webinar invite from Dell. The company on April 22 plans to educate corporate customers about Everdream, a remote administration and asset management tool for PCs and mobile systems.

Now for the challenge: When Dell acquired Everdream and Silverback in 2007, some managed service providers worried that the PC giant would circumvent partners and market managed services directly to corporate customers.

Memo to Dell: Here’s how to eliminate such fear in your partner base. Read More >

If you’re wondering how managed storage services will evolve in the business market, perhaps you should keep an eye on the customer industry. There, Hewlett-Packard and a bunch of start-ups are launching online storage services that promote simple file access and file sharing.

Here’s a look at how the consumer managed storage market is evolving, and how it may soon impact the small business market. Read More >

mindSHIFT, a managed service provider, is pushing deeper into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. The company has acquired Collaboration Online, which specializes in hosted Microsoft applications.

This is the latest example of managed services converging with SaaS, and it reinforces many of the prime MSP opportunities we’ve been writing about in recent weeks — particularly hosted SharePoint, Dynamics and Exchange services.

It’s also the latest example of mergers and acquisitions within the MSP sector. (See our M&A Tracker for a list of deals.)

Here’s a bit more on mindSHIFT’s plans for Collaboration Online.

Read More >

Each time I chat with a VAR or solutions provider, the topic of Microsoft SharePoint seems to pop into the conversation. Channel players are having great success deploying SharePoint for their customers. It begs the question: Will SharePoint emerge as a managed service as well? I believe so, but what’s your take?

Read More >

Gavin Garbutt, CEO of N-able Technologies, is a glass-half-full type of guy. Despite the tricky U.S. economy, Garbutt sees continued momentum for the managed services industry, and offers some anecdotal proof points that business is humming along — globally. Read More >

I wrote that same headline for one of my blog entries about a year ago. Even today, I believe that open application programming interfaces (APIs) will be the difference between success and failure in the managed services industry.

The latest example: Autotask is writing to Kaseya’s APIs, in a bid to build tighter integration between the two automation platforms. Plenty of other companies are kicking around the API concept in a bid to snap their platforms together.

In some ways, the current API movement mirrors the early days of Microsoft Windows. MSPs that study Microsoft’s rise in the operating system world are bound to thrive in today’s software industry. Here’s why. Read More >

Demand for managed services in the United States will grow 7 percent annually through 2012, according to a new report from Research and Markets. Frankly, the report sounds very conservative, considering top managed service providers are generating double- and even trip-digit revenue growth rates, according to our own MSPmentor 100 report. Read More >