MSPmentor

U.S. investors are dealing with a bear stock market. And our SaaS 20 Stock Index is down nearly 20 percent this year. Time for managed service providers to panic? Perhaps not. Anecdotal evidence — including a bullish blog entry from Nimsoft CEO Gary Read — suggests the MSP market continues to hum along. Here’s the scoop.

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MSPAlliance President Charles Weaver has written a white paper for Nimsoft, focused on 12 strategic best practices for managed service providers. The white paper, along with more than 40 other customer case studies and videos on managed services, is available now in our MSPmentor Resource Center (registration required).

When you enter the Resource Center, scroll down to section 13 to find the piece penned by Weaver.

I’m packing my bags and heading to the Kaseya User Conference in Las Vegas, which runs June 1-3. On the one hand, I expect to hear plenty of “Kaseya” centric news at the event. But I will also be digging deeper, meeting with managed service providers and corporate IT leaders, to hear about their experiences and learnings in the managed services market. Here are five trends or themes I’ll be exploring.

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During a conversation yesterday with Ken Vanderweel, director of product marketing for Nimsoft, we discussed the flood of Wintel (Windows on Intel) VARs moving into the managed services market. In my opinion that’s a good thing — and a bad thing.

I worry that many MSPs will repeat some of the mistakes they made during their days as break-fix specialists for Microsoft Windows. Don’t get me wrong: Microsoft has done a lot of good for the IT market. Windows NT, Exchange Server, SQL Server and other Microsoft platforms freed customers from expensive software that was locked to proprietary hardware. And those platforms created opportunities for VARs and independent software developers.

But I wonder if enough MSPs will push beyond their Microsoft roots, to develop simple, elegant and powerful online services. Or, stated more directly: Can MSPs apply Apple-like quality and polish to their online services?

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The MSPAlliance held its Managed Services Summit earlier this week in Framingham, Mass. Although I didn’t attend the event, I interviewed a few attendees and vendors to get a feel for their top priorities in the months ahead. Here are seven key trends I heard about:

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At first glance, managed services platforms represent the perfect business opportunity for VARs. But take a closer look — and talk to companies like Kaseya and Nimsoft — and you’ll discover a completely different target customer for MSP-centric systems. Here’s the scoop.

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Even as some managed service providers begin to feel pressure from the economic slowdown, there are hints that the MSP market continues to generate healthy growth. A key example: Nimsoft, which develops IT performance and availability monitoring solutions, says it generated record Q1 results — including 83 percent recurring revenue growth.

Nimsoft announced the results on May 14, but I sensed another upbeat quarter from the company when I interviewed CEO Gary Read on April 7. Here’s a bit more on Nimsoft’s results, and its meaning to the broader MSP market.

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If the managed service market is so darn hot, when can we expect MSP platform providers to begin launching initial public offerings?

I raised that question during an interview with Nimsoft CEO Gary Read on Monday (April 7). While Read can’t speak directly for other MSP platform providers, he certainly has some strong opinions about Nimsoft’s potential path to an IPO. Here’s a sampling of his thoughts. Read More >