Autotask: Back to the Future with VARStreet
To drive your profits to their highest levels possible, you can’t just focus on services. Instead, VARs and MSPs need to mix in products. That was the central message from Autotask CEO Bob Godgart this morning at the Autotask Community Live conference in Miami, where roughly 500 VARs and MSPs have gathered to talk strategy. No surprise, Godgart positioned VARStreet — a product sourcing dashboard — as a core service that can help solutions providers to bolster their profits. Here’s a recap.
As you may recall, Autotask acquired VARStreet in March 2010. Since that time, the company has been working on new components that will allow VARs to build on-line storefronts that rival Amazon.com and CDW, Godgart said in an interview last night. Also of note: Ingram Micro Seismic and Synnex are at the conference, and more than a dozen other major distributors are plugging into VARStreet, Godgart says.
The goal for Autotask is to push beyond the traditional North American managed services market. Instead of focusing purely on 10,000 North American MSPs, Godgart says Autotask also will pursue 90,000 North American VARs. Of course, Autotask also has a global strategy but last night’s chatter focused mostly on pursuing the North American masses. “We took PSA and brought it to the masses; with VARStreet you will be able to get started for just $99 a month,” says Godgart.
During his keynote this morning, Godgart explained how pure product VARs and pure services MSPs are leaving money, margin and profit on the table. Within two weeks or so, VARStreet will be fully integrated with Autotask — allowing solutions providers to profit from both products and services.
Still, Autotask and VARStreet will face plenty of competition in the product sourcing market, as The VAR Guy has previously pointed out.
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Excellent synopsis VAR Guy.
Not only was Back to the Future the theme of the keynote (with a funny Doc Brown video no less), it made me think about the pendulum shifting in our industry.
The mantra around shifting business models to things like professional and managed services, cloud, and virtualization (to name a few) seems to always follow the “all or none” approach.
As we get reminded everyday in health circles, “balance” is the key to longevity. The same goes with the IT business. It makes great headlines to say a tsunami is coming, but the inevitable outcome is always a graduated or measured growth. As compelling as these new business models sound, most of them never hit double digits in the first 5-10 years of existence. Brings us back to balance.
A healthy IT VAR will have a strong blend of hardware, software and services revenue wrapped around bullet-proof customer relationships. Autotask and VARStreet is a unique and exciting combination that will encourage this “balance” of margins and net profit dollars.
Now, back to the Delorean!
Jay: The VAR Guy always welcomes your thoughts. Looking forward to catching up tomorrow. In the meantime, our resident blogger is watching closely to see if VARStreet fulfills its promise…
=TVG