Carbonite and Webroot: Maximizing MSP Revenue with Strategic Bundles, Vendor Resources

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO, LAS VEGAS — At Monday’s MSP Summit, an OpenText partner executive coached MSPs on what they can do to maximize revenue with Carbonite and Webroot. He also suggested they demand more from their vendors and take advantage of everything they’re offering to maximize revenue.

Justin Gilbert (pictured above), OpenText’s senior director of partner recruitment, led the keynote focused on five ways to grow your MSP in 2022 with Carbonite, Webroot and AppRiver, which are OpenText companies.

“OpenText as a company has been acquiring companies with the goal of building a cyber resilience solution for the partner community wrapped around Microsoft 365,” he said. “Ultimately, what it means for you guys is, as partners, if you’re looking to build out your bundles, your managed service bundles, if you’re looking to add to those bundles, and to reach out into your customer base to sell them new things, between AppRiver, Carbonite and Webroot, we likely have a solution to solve your needs.”

OpenText’s preventive solutions include security awareness training and a Microsoft 365 security audit, Gilbert said.

“At the endpoint, we have endpoint backup and endpoint protection, and you go to the server side and we have server backup,” he said. “Beyond that, if you get into the cloud, we have the entire Microsoft 365 suite with Azure included. And then in front of that, we have things like email threat protection and cloud-to-cloud backup. And if you have compliance-based customers, we have things like an information archiving service and advanced email encryption.”

Recommendations for MSPs

OpenText has five recommendations for MSPs to maximize and grow their Microsoft investment. Those include:

• Improving margins and competitive advantage.
• Focusing on layered security.
• Selling a strategic bundle.
• Simplifying your operating environment.
• Leveraging vendor resources

“When it comes to Microsoft 365, AppRiver is the longest-running Microsoft 365 partner in the world,” Gilbert said. “We’ve been selling Microsoft 365 longer than anyone else, we have the longest-running partner program and we’ve been helping our partners to be able to take advantage of Microsoft services. Even if you don’t partner with us, you should partner with someone with a storied history with Microsoft. There’s plenty of vendors out there.”

MSPs should ask each of their vendors for one-on-one consultations on how Microsoft’s new commerce experience will impact their specific business, he said.

“Another thing we’ve been really passionate about is talking to partners about rebates,” Gilbert said. “If your vendor is not currently doing consultations with you about rebates, they should. Call them up. That’s one of the things the vendors are happy to do.”

Strategic Bundles

Strategic bundles should include services like remote monitoring, support hours, X hours per workstation and vendor management, Gilbert said.

“The other thing that wraps up is all of your commodity based services, Microsoft 365, things like backup or whatever else,” he said. “When you sell your customers individual services, the first thing they do is reach out to your competitors. They want to price that up. Whereas if you have that all wrapped up in one price, the only thing they can compare you to is your other bundles.”

OpenText is not only helping partners sell more services, but also build operational efficiency, Gilbert said.

“If you can call fewer help desks, if you can have fewer PSA integrations, fewer billing errors and a smaller amount of time supporting your customers, it just makes your bundle that you’ve created that much more valuable to you,” he said.

In addition, leverage everything your partners are offering, Gilbert said.

“If your partners are trying to give you consultation hours, you should take it,” he said. “If your partners are trying to give your salespeople training on selling their services, but more importantly on selling your own, you should take it.”