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.”

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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.

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“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.”

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But Aggarwal’s most recent work with Zyrion is what lands him on the MSPmentor 250 list. Zyrion provides BSM (business service management) and IT infrastructure monitoring software for the government vertical, MSPs and the enterprise. I spoke with Aggarwal to find out how he envisions the future of the MSP sector.

“We [Zyrion] believe at the end of the day it is essential for larger MSPs that we service to get a visual service-oriented representation of their customers’ IT infrastructure,” Aggarwal said. “You can’t just monitor a bunch of servers and routers. You need to know what’s important to your customers. That’s the demand we hear from larger MSPs who get it.”

When Aggarwal broke into the network monitoring space, MSPs were seen only as a way to outsource IT departments. Now, he says, customers want MSPs to get to the core of their network problems. So Zyrion focuses on giving IT operators a complete service-centric view of their clients’ environment so that they can categorize all of the equipment. “We’ve seen success in the market because of our business service management,” Aggarwal continued. “It lets MSPs visualize the IT infrastructure from the services point of view.”

Aggarwal referred to virtualization and cloud-computing as “the two big industry game changers.” Now more than ever, he says, larger MSPs have customers demanding service containers to categorize all of their equipment.

Zyrion’s response? The company will soon release new functionality to help further simplify network monitoring. “The new release will include more intelligence in how we process performance data. It will tell MSPs and their clients what’s important and what’s not. They [MSP's] will be able to eliminate the stuff that’s irrelevant and make it easier for clients to prioritize their needs.”

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In just 18 months, Anderson and Bratton claim, the duo has helped over 100 MSPs in Australia and New Zealand change their dialogue and their revenue figures, creating long-term recurring revenue plans through a one-day business development program. But let’s back up for a minute. Who are these two MSP money strategists?

Bratton began working as a consultant for Kaseya in 2008 to help the company penetrate Australia and New Zealand. Then he realized a common mistake MSPs were making when speaking with clients. “They speak about technology on a very high level,” he said. “Unfortunately, that’s how they speak to their SMB customers. The SMBs just want the technology to work. They really care about the money angle.” Bratton recognized there was no sales training for MSPs in his part of the world, so he put together an end-to-end marketing strategy for MSPs. And that’s where Anderson came in.

Rob Anderson has been a sales performance consultant and trainer across 30 countries for the last 25 years. You can read more about his career here, but in short, the guy knows how to make money. And after sharing his revenue secrets with global organizations in the U.K. and Australia, Anderson has taken his talents to the MSP space.

“Over the past 15-16 months we’ve started 15, one-day marketing and sales training programs in Australia and new Zealand,” Anderson said. Each one-day training session costs $1,995 Australian dollars per employee. Winning New Clients runs those employees through 14 different tools to increase their recurring revenue. Then they practice staged scenarios so that they can work on how to speak to potential clients.

There are 25 total tools clients can download through the online suite to help their sales strategy, including campaign and brand planning tools, a website CMS template, and best practice white paper tips for SMB ITs. “The tools are based on client needs,” Anderson continued. “Basically what we are creating here is a CRM for an MSP.”

Winning New Clients is going through the same cloud transformation as its MSP clients. Bratton and Anderson are working on a cloud-based training and tools suite, and working with Kaseya to approach new regions geographically. The cloud expansion should happen in January 2012.

Something to keep in mind: Bandwidth in some Asia-Pacific areas costs about $5 per megabyte, compared to 30 cents in the U.S., so Anderson expects the hybrid cloud to be far more popular among MSPs in Australia and New Zealand.

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According to Balzer, White Glove aims to offer a broad list of services, providing services and project work from website design to offsite backup to managed offerings and on-call responses to small and midsized businesses in the 50-mile radius around the San Antonio/Austin area where they’re based.

Business has been good, with consistent 25 percent to 30 percent year-over-year growth and strong profitability, Balzer says – though he does also add that of course the economic downturn meant some clients deferred one-time project work and that they dropped pricing on their managed service packages.

White Glove Technologies is no stranger to acquisitions: The company recently acquired RIATA Technologies; and two years ago, they acquired a company called Network Logistics, which consolidated the local MSP market and gave them more managed services momentum.

In the future, Balzer says that White Glove has an eye towards expanding their growth by way of acquisitions in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, further enhancing their reach in the area and a step towards their goal of doubling growth over the next three years.

Interestingly, while they’re planning on expanding their vertical plays, White Glove has no interest in the government or education markets, which he says require entirely different go-to-market solutions and sales pitches than the private sector.

Otherwise, White Glove Technologies is aiming to enhance their plays when it comes to software and hardware-as-a-service. But Balzer says that the company’s focus will always be on providing IT services to companies with between 5 and 500 seats.

“The SMB market is underserved,” Balzer says.

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7. Solid Start: Rackspace has been speaking with roughly 60 Ingram Micro Seismic VARs and MSPs, and roughly 30 of those partners are now leveraging various Rackspace cloud, hosted and managed services, according to Rackspace National Strategic Alliance Manager Carlos Bendrall. As MSPmentor reported, Rackspace and Ingram Micro Seismic entered a cloud partnership in June 2010. Bendrall says Rackspace can’t reach small VARs and MSPs without strategic partners like Ingram Micro Seismic in place.

6. Coming Soon: During a visit to Spiceworks yesterday, co-founder Jay Hallberg showed me an integrated help desk that will surface in Spiceworks 5.0. In theory, the central dashboard will allow MSPs and VARs to manage tickets and inquires across multiple customers and companies. For internal IT managers, the help desk system could be set up to manage multiple departments. Spiceworks, as you may recall, is a free, advertising-driven remote IT management platform. Watch for the Spiceworks 5.0 general release sometime in late September, 2010.

5. Creative Solutions Provider: You can find the CompTIA Best of Show award winners listed here. After noting the dominance of MSP-centric software companies, take a look at attendee award winner Clever Ducks. They seem to know how to create steady buzz through regular news announcements that actually have meaning.

4. New Zip Codes: It sounds like former Ingram Micro Seismic leader Justin Crotty is set to start with NetEnrich on Aug. 16. Also, there are rumors that Doyenz has hired a former New England-based channel chief. Who is the mystery man? Check your dictionary and judge the book by its cover.

3. Thinking Bigger: Seems like rivals spent some time with one another at CompTIA Breakaway. A few prime examples: Autotask and Tigerpaw apparently have some mutual admiration for one another, and at least one MSP claims the PSA (professional services automation) companies spent informal time together on Aug. 11. Separately, Kaseya’s Dan Shapero continues to seek ways to grow the managed services market for all RMM (remote monitoring and management) vendors. I believe Shapero spent some conference time with Level Platforms’ Dan Wensley, and Shapero also was introduced to LabTech Software CEO Matt Nachtrab.

2. Next Stop – VMworld?: I’m mulling a trip to VMworld (Aug. 30-Sept. 2, San Francisco). I suspect many VARs and integrators plan to attend. But I wonder: How many people from the managed services community will spend time at VMworld? If you plan to attend please let me know by posting a comment or send me email (joe [at] NineLivesMediaInc [dot] com).

1. The MSPmentor 250: During CompTIA Breakaway, a few readers asked me when the third-annual MSPmentor 250 list and report would surface. The answer: The week of Aug. 16. Check back with us to see the world’s top managed services executives, entrepreneurs, experts, coaches and community leaders.

In the meantime thank for reading MSPmentor. We really enjoy the dialog with you.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. And follow us via RSS, Facebook, Identi.ca; and Twitter. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.

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In order to be considered for the MSPmentor 250 (2009 edition), you had to be nominated via an online survey, which MSPmentor and Nine Lives Media Inc. conducted from May 13, 2009 until July 10, 2009. We considered a range of factors (executive experience, innovations, momentum, track record) as we zeroed in on the top 250 names.

So, what’s the difference between the MSPmentor 100 (unveiled each Q1) and the MSPmentor 250 (unveiled each Q3)? It’s simple: While the MSPmentor 100 focuses on the world’s most successful managed service provider businesses, the MSPmentor 250 focuses on the personalities you need to know across this industry. The MSPmentor 100 leverages fact-based metrics (annual MSP revenue growth, revenue per employee, revenue per managed device, etc.) but the MSPmentor 250 is driven purely by word of mouth and personal reputation.

Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center.

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• MSPmentor 250 (2009 Edition): Part V

The MSPmentor 250, now entering its second year, is produced by MSPmentor and its owner, Nine Lives Media Inc.

Complete the Survey

To nominate someone for the MSPmentor 250, simply fill out this online survey. It only requires a few minutes of time. And yes, you can nominate yourself.

The resulting MSPmentor 250 report, to be published this summer, will likely feature CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, entrepreneurs, sales executives, marketing experts, PR pros, association leaders and other top minds who are shaping the global managed services ecosystem. We don’t rank executives by number. Rather, we present them to you in alphabetical order.

So, what’s the difference between the MSPmentor 100 (unveiled each Q1) and the MSPmentor 250 (unveiled each Q3)? Here are some quick pointers:

• The MSPmentor 100 focuses on the world’s most successful managed service provider businesses. It leverages fact-based metrics (annual MSP revenue growth, revenue per employee, revenue per managed device, etc.).
• The MSPmentor 250 (here’s a look at the 2008 report) focuses on the personalities you need to know across this industry. The MSPmentor 250 is driven by our survey, word of mouth, personal reputation, personal achievements, etc. We’re certainly not saying our approach is perfect. But we think the MSPmentor 250 report is a natural extension to our daily coverage of the MSP market. We talk to the industry leaders daily. And we discover new MSP experts regularly.

Now that I have your attention: Don’t delay. Please nominate the sharpest executives, entrepreneurs and experts to appear in the MSPmentor 250 report. Our survey is available now.

Follow MSPmentor via RSS, Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter. Subscribe to our Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center.

Read More About This Topic

• Last Call: MSPmentor 250 Nominations
• MSPmentor 250 Survey Deadline Is July 10
• 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

The MSPmentor 250, now entering its second year, is produced by MSPmentor and its owner, Nine Lives Media Inc.

Complete the Survey

To nominate someone for the MSPmentor 250, simply fill out this online survey. It only requires a few minutes of time. And yes, you can nominate yourself.

The resulting MSPmentor 250 report, to be published this summer, will likely feature CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, entrepreneurs, sales executives, marketing experts, PR pros, association leaders and other top minds who are shaping the global managed services ecosystem. We don’t rank executives by number. Rather, we present them to you in alphabetical order.

So, what’s the difference between the MSPmentor 100 (unveiled each Q1) and the MSPmentor 250 (unveiled each Q3)? Here are some quick pointers:

• The MSPmentor 100 focuses on the world’s most successful managed service provider businesses. It leverages fact-based metrics (annual MSP revenue growth, revenue per employee, revenue per managed device, etc.).
• The MSPmentor 250 (here’s a look at the 2008 report) focuses on the personalities you need to know across this industry. The MSPmentor 250 is driven by our survey, word of mouth, personal reputation, personal achievements, etc. We’re certainly not saying our approach is perfect. But we think the MSPmentor 250 report is a natural extension to our daily coverage of the MSP market. We talk to the industry leaders daily. And we discover new MSP experts regularly.

Now that I have your attention: Don’t delay. Please nominate the sharpest executives, entrepreneurs and experts to appear in the MSPmentor 250 report. Our survey is available now.

Follow MSPmentor via RSS, Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter. Subscribe to our Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center.

Read More About This Topic

• Who Are the True Managed Services Experts?
• 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