LogMeIn: Starting to Gain MSP Momentum?
In the past week, I’ve heard from three managed services providers who have switched from traditional RMM (remote monitoring and management) software to LogMeIn. And in the media business there’s an old saying: Three’s a trend. Or is it?
According to one MSP, the company switched to LogMeIn and cut its RMM bill from over $8,000 per month down to about $1,500 per month “with no loss of efficiency,” according to the MSP. “LogMeIn — a publicly traded company with lots of resources — is aggressively targeting MSPs now.”
Agreed. When we launched MSPmentor in 2008, we didn’t hear much about LogMeIn’s managed services partner strategy. That began to change by September 2009, when LogMeIn started talking up the managed services market. Through most of 2010, we heard about LogMeIn’s momentum on mobile devices — particularly the Apple iPad and iPhone, and now the Android Tablet. By January 2011, it was finally clear to MSPmentor that the company’s freemium strategy has caught on with corporate customers and some MSPs.
Still, I must concede: I’m curious to see how deep LogMeIn decides to go with MSPs. Most of the traditional RMM software companies remain in growth mode. Plus, those RMM players have build loyal user groups, and the RMM providers spend considerable time and money at MSP-centric partner conferences.
In contrast, I think LogMeIn focuses mostly on corporate IT managers. And so far that strategy has treated LogMeIn well. For its third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2010, LogMeIn’s revenue surged 34 percent to $25.3 million, and net income more than doubled to $4.0 million from $1.8 million.
Back in October 2010, CEO Michael Simon said LogMeIn was benefiting from the mobile workforce trend, stating at the time:
“We believe that our mobility infrastructure provides a great complement to the new generation of mobile hardware and software products. The rapid rise of smart, web-enabled devices is creating a distinct opportunity for LogMeIn’s remote access and remote support products.”
Looking ahead, I’ll be curious to see if Simon mentions channel partners and MSPs during the company’s next earnings call. Because chatter about LogMeIn seems to be picking up within the MSP industry.
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Wondering what RMM tool this MSP was using? To simply swap it with LogMeIn, seems like he was using the wrong tool to being with. While LogMeIn is a great tool it certainly doesn’t do what a strong RMM tool will do.
Confused!! LogmeIn an RMM tool, they have always been in the MSP market for reactive support but proactive is a long way from some of the better technologies, Kaseya, CentraStage, N-Able etc. Reactive support in in the past and MSPs need to understand this and remodel accordingly.
I’ve noticed they are offering online backup too. Has anyone used it?
Kevin Krusiewicz
[email protected]: I apologize but the MSP didn’t disclose which RMM software they had been using.
[email protected]: We’ll be sure to ask LogMeIn users if they have pro-active or re-active approaches in our future coverage.
[email protected]: Hadn’t heard about online backup but will check it out. Thanks for the tip.
-jp
I have to say when I first read this article my first reaction was similar to the comments from Paul and Gary. My impression of LogMeIn is that it is a reactive only tool that allows you to take remote control of windows servers or workstations. I looked on their site and while this certainly appears to be the core of the product they do advertise that they provide “alerts” I pulled this from their website.
“Monitoring computer health and status, through proactive alerts, charts, and reports
•Tracking computer inventory and reporting on IT service delivery”
So it appears that the product does in fact offer some sort of limited monitoring solution. I am sure it is not anything comparable to that of the RMM tools.
I personally cannot imagine replacing a full function RMM tool (Level Platforms, Kaseya, Labtech, etc…) with a tool like LogMeIn. However, I can see where a smaller VAR that is focused on the SOHO market might feel that the basic alerting function is sufficient for what they are offering their customers.
Lane Smith
Do IT Smarter
While Kaseya, Zenith , and N-Able are great tools for the MSP, LogMeIn is certainly worth looking at and in my opinion, will soon become a better product than all the rest.
Though LogMeIn doesn’t have all the features available yet that the software packs mentioned above have, they have the majority of the features that are needed to get the job done efficiently.
1.) Monitoring and Alerting: The ability to create and maintain a central monitoring package, and assign it to multiple servers and workstations is MUCH easier than applying such a package in Kaseya. We have had Kaseya, Zenith, and LMI side by side, and MOST of the time, we received the LMI alert prior to receiving the others.
2.) Remote Access: The ability to reliably connect to a system from a mobile device, IPad, IPhone, Mac, Windows is worth everything in my opinion. Kaseya’s VNC is poor at best, and Zentih’s version of LMI is limited.. In the end, clients wanted anywhere access from all their toys.
3.) Scripting: LMI has the ability to execute batch files, install software, update registry settings, distribute files, and more from their One2Many console and it works great! It is missing the ability to do the level1 automatic scripting so when an alert is detected, it runs a script automatically, but I personally never used that feature in Kaseya either..It’s just as easy to deploy a One2Many task once you receive the alert.
4.) Reporting: LMI still gives us the ability to run reports to see the install hardware, software, service tag etc…
One of the missing features as of today is Patch Management.. Yes this is important, however i think you will see some great new features coming out soon from LogMeIN, that will put them side by side with Kaseya and the others..
N
Lane, Nick: Thanks for the deeper analysis.
-jp
We have been using LogMeIn for 5 years or so, but not for RMM. We’ve been using Labtech for about a year as our primary RMM tool. LogMeIn doesn’t replace Labtech for us, but their Pro2 product has some pretty awesome features. It provides bullet-proof remote access, thats faster than anything else besides RDP.N-Able uses a stripped down version for their remote support product.
So we have our RMM tool in place, but we also have LogMeIn in place (some paid Pro2 subscriptions and mostly free). We do a lot of help desk support and even remote training…try doing remote training with the typical RMM remote access method and you’ll find it isn’t very pleasant! We also use it as an easy method to provide remote access to workstations to employees without setting up TS, TS Gateways, etc. It allows us to provide a “managed service” to clients that we know we won’t have to spend extra time troubleshooting and supporting.
In 5 years we’ve had almost no downtime and constant improvement! I love Labtech and all of our automation occurs in Labtech, but LogMeIn is always going to be a key tool for the foreseeable future.