“MSP’s have to craft their services around customer relationships,” Bolton said. “We are helping customers map together their business with their technology. We don’t look at managing a server or a router. We look at what type of services businesses need to run their business effectively.”

Many MSPs today are servicing businesses in several different verticals. It’s a way for them to expand their client base and regional presence. It makes them appealing to many more businesses. But Bolton, always quick to recognize trends before they fully come to fruition, believes that there will be a verticalized integration movement within the MSP community, both in terms of on-premise and hosted solutions. And Bolton is doing everything he can to help PacketTrap clients stay ahead of that verticalization curve.

That’s the premise behind PacketTrap MSP, a remote monitoring and management platform that Bolton spearheads. PacketTrap released PacketTrap MSP 6.0 in early 2011. Bolton said the PacketTrap team got into the MSP space in the first place because of their network management background. And in an SEC filing earlier this year, Quest suggested that PacketTrap MSP has been exceeding sales expectations.

“We were hearing from customers that they had a gap in their service offerings around routers, switches, internal traffic, etc.,” he said.” So PacketTrap started to evolve as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings became more prevalent. The company has been monitoring virtual machines for over 1 1/2 years. Today, Bolton tries to keep his team at the forefront of new technologies and problems that are coming on to the network. “We can monitor traffic, but also VoIP systems themselves,” Bolton continued. “We saw that becoming an issue with MSPs running VoIP on top of their data networks.”

Bolton sees the managed services industry moving toward reselling hosted services and applications instead of installing hardware-based solutions. To that end, Bolton said we can expect PacketTrap to do more service delivery in the future. And as we speak, PacketTrap is developing a service delivery platform that he says will “deploy, monitor and support whichever way clients want to take their business.”

Read More About This Topic

• Cepra Chooses Nimsoft RMM, Service Desk for Managed Services
• SMB Computer Security and Internet Security Awareness Grows
• LabTech Distributes RMM Software In EMEA, Asia-Pacific
• SMB Disaster Recovery is Recipe for MSP Success
• SMBs Crave Mobile Phone and Smartphone Tech Support

Bodie began working as a sub-contractor for Claris Networks in 2007 before becoming chief financial officer (CFO) and chief operating officer (COO) in 2008. He became Claris Networks CEO in March 2009 and has since helped the company blend its managed services and virtualization solutions into a single managed services cloud offering.

“We really figured out how to package the cloud in 2008,” Bodie said. But we called it a secure suite, not cloud.” Even after the development of its secure suite, Claris was still having trouble selling its solutions. The reason: Claris offered too many options, which slowed down customer decisions. So Bodie and the Claris team settled on its current per-use model to make the service easier for customers to consume. “That was the changing point for us,” he said. “That’s when sales really took off.”

Bodie credits the per-use model for the company’s growth from 25 employees in 2009 to over 50 today. He also points to the company’s long history of cloud development as a key to Claris’ success. Claris built its own cloud in 2005 and still operates its own cloud network today instead of buying cloud capacity from a third party provider. “It’s expensive,” Bodie said, “But at least I’m in control of it.”

More recently, Claris Networks has launched cloud environments in London and Tokyo. And the company acquired Chattanooga, Tenn.-based SRC technologies this year to expand its regional footprint.

So where does Bodie see the MSP industry heading? “I see that MSPs embracing the cloud tend to be stickier,” he said — meaning that cloud services help MSPs to retain customers.

Bodie attended VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas last week and was overwhelmed by the number of cloud providers on hand. “The cloud is everywhere, literally,” Bodie added. “We [MSPs] need to be talking about how to become cloud integrators. When you talk about the future, it’s going to be about helping customer figure out which cloud services work for them.”

Read More About This Topic

• VMworld: ManageEngine Prepares Virtualization Management
• Long View: Managed Services Plus Cloud Services Equals Growth
• Unisys: MSPs Need to Go to the Cloud or Die
• SMBs Need Help Solving Database Problems
• Whaleback Adds Cloud-Managed Voice Services for Mobile Devices

NetEnrich spent the last month surveying established and potential users of NetEnrich’s SMB solutions to pinpoint emerging market opportunities, according to Net Enrich Vice President of Corporate Marketing Jennifer Anaya, an MSPmentor 250 member.

The result of the research? The NetEnrich Small Business Services Package. “We packaged together services that make an ideal IT operations suite for MSPs primarily serving SMBs,” Anaya explained. “This service is for SMBs of fifty employees or less, with up to five servers and five network devices. These are small environments, but they still need management and monitoring support.” The NetEnrich Small Business Services Package starts at $159 and includes:

1. One- Server and OS, including up to three Infrastructure Applications that will be monitored, managed with standardized preventative care (Patching & A/V update)
2. One-Firewall and the Internet Service Provider (ISP) managed via up/down monitoring and full-ISP remediation; or partners can choose to have one-L1 router or switch managed
3. ITIL-based Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) practices on all device alerts and alert remediation, with Vendor Technical Support for the Infrastructure applications and one-Firewall
4. Desktop preventative care, which includes Anti-Virus updates for up to five Desktops
5. Business-critical SBS IT operation reports

“We knew we needed to address a few very key points of feedback, like simplicity issues,” Anaya said. “Many SMBs have a very small engineering staff – maybe two or three people – and they were spending too much fixing problems and managing alerts instead of serving customers, developing new solutions or taking on new technologies. They were on ultimate overload. So we’ve packaged our solutions in an easier way, and our price point is now much more competitive for our MSP clients to take to their SMBs.”

The NetEnrich Small Business Services Package will be sold by the Ingram Micro Services Division through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace, joining a host of other solutions recently added to the Ingram Mirco Cloud Marketplace, including N-Able N-Central, Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud (SEP.Cloud) and Trend Micro’s Worry-Free Business Services, among others.

Read More About This Topic

• Managed Services: 7 Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write, Oct. 21
• Managed Services: 7 Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write, Nov. 4
• Recurring Revenues: Big Tech Companies Finally Assist Channel Partners
• N-Able, Ingram Micro Partner on Freemium Managed Services Software
• MSPmentor 250: Jennifer Anaya’s ‘Closet to Cloud’ Approach

The MSPmentor 250 PDF contains everything you need to rapidly build relationships with the managed services industry’s top executives, entrepreneurs, experts, community leaders, coaches and more. Visit the MSPmentor 250 Center to read our online coverage and/or download the PDF (registration is required for the PDF).

Side note: We’re still kicking around ways to piece together a Locked in the NOC List — basically a profile of industry luminaries who are just too darn prolific and need to be moved off the MSPmentor 250 in 2012, so that new folks can step into the spotlight as well…

Read More About This Topic

• MSPmentor 250: Top Managed Services Executives, Part I of V
• MSPmentor 250: Top Managed Services Executives, Part II of V
• MSPmentor 250: Top Managed Services Execs, Today’s Update
• MSPmentor 250: Top Managed Services Experts, Part IV of V
• MSPmentor 250: The Top Managed Services Experts, Part V

“The first thing we did to become an MSP was start selling recurring block time,” Bender recalled.”From that we began to adopt Kaseya and Connectwise and we dove into real time management and monitoring of PCs.” Bender’s strategy is to stay general and not align the company with any single vertical. His philosophy is a product of the southern California market in which inhouseIT operates — a market that Bender says has so many different types of businesses whose technology is “90 percent ubiquitous.”

Staying broad has allowed inhouseIT to add solutions and even develop another company — Spam Soap — a hosted email security solutions provider that offers inbound and outbound filtering.

Bender explained how the idea of Spam Soap came to fruition: “We were originally working with an inhouseIT client that had an IT manager on their staff who we were supplementing services for. He had this crazy idea that he was going to make the world unsafe for spammers.” Spam Soap has carved out its own industry niche over the last decade, and the company has added continuity, an extra layer of antivirus, encryption and several archiving services over that time period.

More recently, Spam Soap gained some former Do IT Smarter customers after Do IT Smarter exited the Master MSP market, MSPmentor has reported. (As part of the planned transition, Do IT Smarter helped its partners to engage with Spam Soap.)

The evolution of Spam Soap has made inhouseIT as a whole more attractive to several different markets.”Doing business with different types of companies is one of our fundamental business strategies, and we are always looking for more clients,” said Bender, who noted that there is no shortage of competition around inhouseIT’s Orange County, Calif., market space. “The burden is on the MSP to offer more services to the same clients,” he said. “That got us started on offering VoIP and carrier services.” inhouseIT is now focused on offering virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to mid-market companies.

Read More About This Topic

• Managed Services: 7 Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write, Oct. 21
• Ask a Mentor: How Can I Compare Managed Services Software?
• Seven Managed Services Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write: Dec. 31
• Another Way for MSPs to Build Customer Reports: BrightGauge
• ConnectWise Capital: Two Years Later

Bell’s background is in the enterprise as she spent many years performing IT contract work for big businesses. But as Bell explains, there were obstacles: “It’s tough to make it up the enterprise ladder as a woman. Things were said like ‘I don’t know how you know how to do that’ or they were surprised when I pickup a server and put it in a rack, but I can sling hardware with the best of them.” Indeed, our conversation was delayed a few minutes because Bell was replacing a server for one of her clients.

Bell founded Citrus after listening to her friends — small business owners — complain about their IT staff and/or external service providers. So Bell started doing IT work for her friends on weekends for free. And when she eventually left the enterprise space to start Citrus, she already had about seven clients signed from day one. Bell hired an admin to answer phones, a staff member to set up sales meetings, and began offering a flat-fee billing IT model before becoming a full service MSP and developing creative contracts about two years ago. Citrus’ biggest challenge? It’s demographic.

“Citrus county is about two hours north of Tampa,” Bell explained. “Its’ very rural, and our biggest challenge is pricing our product for our customers. We are the highest- priced MSP in our area, but we are not competing with the $35-an-hour guy. We are different.”

So what’s the difference? For one, Citrus is about 90 percent remote. The company manages about 600 devices for roughly 20 clients mostly from its data center in Citrus County. Citrus is also a Microsoft Certified Partner, and Bell tries to, in her words, “keep overhead down and partner wherever we can.” Citrus has built partnerships withAutotask, Kaseya and Reflexion Neworks, just to name a few. All this so that Bell can go into sales meetings talking about performance instead of cost.

“The biggest thing to the SMB owner is that they want their employees to work. They don’t want to walk in and see them doing nothing because computers don’t work. We focus on quick response and keeping businesses running the way they want. That’s what we hone in on. We don’t talk about price until they understand what managed services is. We focus on their servers being up and that we run things behind the scenes and we keep people working when they are supposed to be working.”

Virtualization and the cloud haven’t been big topics of discussion between Citrus and its clients because of the size of their business, but Bell stays up to speed on industry technology in case the question comes up. Bell admittedly plays devil’s advocate as a member of the Cloud Convergence Counsel because many of her clients have poor infrastructure.

“Some [clients] are still running on DSL, so putting them on the cloud doesn’t work at all,” she said. And as far as virtualization, not many clients have more than one server so it doesn’t come in to play.” Citrus has other goals more aligned with its demographic.  Next on the agenda for Citrus: A possible partnership with Xerox to offer managed print services.

Read More About This Topic

• Now Available: Our June 25 and June 12 Webcasts (Archived)
• Five Anticipated Trends At Kaseya User Conference
• Autotask Extends Offer to Microsoft Partners
• Who Sits At the Center of the MSP Universe?
• Intel vPro: Critical Mass with Managed Services Providers?

Bayer previously helped a fixed wireless mobile operator in Bangladesh transition to WiMAX. Impressed with Bayer’s knowledge of the wireless and mobile market, a friend at IBM forwarded Bayer’s resume to AVNET. The result? Bayer is now leading AVNET partners into the age of he refers to as “mobile user management.”

“All we hear about is mobile device management (MDM),” Bayer said. “But there are many other aspects like security, enablement, compliance, asset management, lifecycle management and expense. That mobile device is going to change about every six months.”

So Bennet helps AVNET partners focus on developing brower-based mobile environments that cater to the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment. “What we have seen from partners is that the enterprise is no longer purchasing the device. Users are purchasing the devices and the enterprise is providing secure access over the network to secure environments. You [AVNET partners] need to deliver information contextually and by location regardless of what the mobile application is,” he explained.

More specifically, Bayer helps partners narrow mobile user management down to the three P’s: performance, privacy and personalization. He argues that the type mobile device being used does not matter nearly as much as how information is sent and gathered over those devices, and his three P philosophy is a major reason why AVNET partners, according to Bennet, grow their business 37-48 percent faster than their peers. “At the end of the day I am here to help them [partners] grow faster, take cost out of their businesses and reduce risk,” Bennet said. “This is my day job. I’m always fixed on where our partners are and how I can help them grow. I think I have the best job at AVNET.”

Read More About This Topic

• Amtel Releases Free Mobile Device Management (MDM) for Enterprise
• Mobile Devices, Smartphones and Tablets: A Writer’s Conundrum
• ManageEngine to Debut iOS MDM at Mobile World Congress
• Echoworx Secure Cloud Manages Encryption Services
• Netology Hires New Managed Services Director

“I’ve seen a ton of evolution and growth in this space,” said Belair, as he recalled some of his first conversations with VARs shortly after N-Able was founded. “Eleven years ago we were really talking to VARs that were seeing a shift in hardware and software margins and a shift in how they added value to customers’ business,” he said. “We were talking about how to capitalize on the service movement and how to develop better relationships with customers. MSPs have evolved very significantly since those days.”

Today, he says, MSPs are trying to move beyond offering proactive services. They want to penetrate vertical markets and grow their business. They want their RMM platform to be a true toolset with complimentary technology built in, like anti-spam and antivirus, and Belair is using his experience to help meet these needs.

“Having worked in the channel as long as I did, I have really come to understand the channel business and the value that it brings,” Belair said. “We can’t undervalue the relationship between VARs and MSPs, and the end-user. They have a trusted business relationship. It is one of the most valuable things they have and they cherish it. We are very respectful of that.”

Belair has used his channel experience to help N-Abe expand its presence to New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and South America. N-Able has been testing the marketplace in Asia throughout 2010-11, and Belair said we can expect N-Able to really pursue partners in Asia in 2012-13. And the company will do so with the same business model it has had since day one. “We have always worked to remove barriers to entrance and growth in the MSP space,” Belair said. “My goal is to work with N-Able to make it grow into a business that we always knew it could be.”

Read More About This Topic

• Managed Services Software Certification: A Growing Trend?
• N-able Adds VMware Support and Google Android Mobile App
• Level Platforms Managed Workplace 2012: RMM Meets MDM
• N-able Recaps Managed Services Market Momentum
• Managed Print Services: Nearing A Tipping Point?

Andreozzi’s vision came fruition in 2002 when he founded KnowledgeCentrix. Nearly a decade later, KnowledgeCentrix is recognized by the Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States, and Andreozzi is a member of the 2011 MSPmentor 250, which tracks the top executives, entrepreneurs and experts in the managed services industry.

“What we were calling IT outsourcing at that time has evolved into what we call managed services today, and now it’s really being shaped by cloud computing,” Andreozzi said. “The industry is evolving into a utility model. People want to know how they can buy IT on a price-per-user model so that they can scale up and scale down as their needs change. In the long term, the successful companies will be the ones that address those demands through developing their own own cloud solutions or through partnerships.”

KnowledgeCentrix does both. Two of its most important technology partners, according to Andreozzi, are Microsoft and Citrix, with “Dell running at a hot third.” KnowledgeCentrix also has a longstanding partnership with Ingram Micro, as Andreozzi is on the Ingram Micro Service Advisory Council. On the solutions side, KnowledgeCentrix has is own private cloud offering. The company advises clients on the best strategies to implement the cloud, or help them leverage the KnowledgeCentrix private cloud.

“Consulting has always been a part of KnowledgeCentrix,” Andreozzi said. “We’ve never just sold a product. Our role is help people navigate technology.  We are still a provider. I think we are doing a little bit more consulting, but there is still a high demand for our services. People are moving to the cloud, but I wouldn’t say people are running to the cloud.”

Andreozzi fully intends to expand KnowledgeCentrix’s regional coverage and service offerings. The company recently expanded into San Diego, Calif, where Andreozzi said the company “is going to make a really hard push.” KnowledgeCentrix is also working new service offerings that it will reveal once they are closer to being released.

Read More About This Topic

• Cepra Chooses Nimsoft RMM, Service Desk for Managed Services
• MSP Acquistion: Dimension Data Nabs Bluefire, Netforce
• BMC RemedyForce: Cloud-based IT Service Desk Has Strong Start
• CommVault Scores as Leading MSP Chooses Simpana 9
• SunGard: Managed Recovery Program for Cloud and On-Premise

“I started with NextStep 20 years ago as a receptionist while I was still in school,” said Arnold, who studied communications and writing at the University of Kentucky. “I learned the job, mastered it, got bored and moved on to the next job. My role started expanding. It’s not what I thought I would do after college, but I was waiting tables and they needed help. It was a good, stable job.”

Arnold continued mastering and expanding her role with NextStep for over a decade until she grabbed a key opportunity in 2008: NextStep’s founder was looking for an exit strategy and Arnold started taking over the day-to-day operations bit by bit. “I fell in love with the business side of NextStep,” Arnold said. “So I started accumulating the business side of the house. I just love being a problem solver.”

Only a true problem solver could take over a small MSP in 2008, during the height of the U.S. economic recession, and grow a company’s yearly profits by 157 percent while building relationships with Level Platforms Inc. and VMware. Arnold’s problem-solving prowess is what guided her from receptionist to the corner office as president, which she calls her most rewarding position yet.

NextStep Networking has been an MSP for over 15 years and serves SMB clients with 30 to 300 users. During 2011, NextStep has been focused on furthering its growth strategy and signing new clients. The next challenge? Figuring out where the company, and MSPs fit as a whole, in a cloud environment. “Even if you are completely cloud-based, you still need people to make things work, like firewall and fixing computer problems. Those things will never go away.”

And as for her career choice? Everything worked out in the end: “It was never my intentional career path,” she said. “But I think this is where I’m supposed to be.” MSPmentor 250 survey participants certainly agree.

Read More About This Topic

• Seven Managed Services Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write: May 27
• Seven Managed Services Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write: July 23
• Level Platforms Managed Workplace 2012: RMM Meets MDM
• ManageEngine to Debut iOS MDM at Mobile World Congress
• NTRglobal and N-able Extend Help Desk Deal to the Cloud