How MSPs Can Monetize Mobile Device Management Effectively

Mobile device management is growing among businesses with bring-your-own-device policies in place. But the benefits of BYOD also come with headaches. Here's how MSPs can help customers secure devices and data while at the same time adding to their own profitability.

The service industry is all about understanding customer needs and offering the best solution possible in a given situation. It is absolutely essential to understand the trends and the changing needs of the market to service the customers. One such trend is mobile device management. Even though, MSPs have been actively providing IT infrastructure management solutions, the growth in the use of employee-owned devices like smartphones/tablets at the workplace, more commonly termed BYOD, has created new challenges for the organizations to manage.

Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of the employers around the world will require employees to carry their own devices to work. According to the report, “BYOD is occurring in companies and governments of all sizes, it is most prevalent in midsize and large organizations ($500 million to $5 billion in revenue, with 2,500 to 5,000 employees).

BYOD also permits smaller companies to go mobile without a huge device and service investment. Adoption varies widely across the globe. Companies in the United States are twice as likely to allow BYOD as those in Europe, where BYOD has the lowest adoption of all the regions. In contrast, employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device, typically a standard mobile phone, at work. (Here’s a link to the Gartner information.)

Is this the right opportunity for MSPs?

Compared to desktops, mobile devices have shown a strong growth in the market all over the world, which has made today’s workforce more mobile than ever. The concept of BYOD has raised challenges in organizations in terms of data security, application handling and also network security. MSPs can play a major role in providing MDM as a service and taking away the load from the Enterprise.

It is important for MSPs to analyze and interpret the customer needs to ensure that the opportunity for MDM is ripe. A few of the questions they can ask before pitching MDM could include:

Do customers face any mobile management challenges?
Are there any mobile centric requests from customers? If the answer is yes, then what is the reason.
Will it be a sound business opportunity?

If MSPs can find satisfactory answers to such questions, they could easily cash in on the opportunity. As evident from market analysts’ predictions, organizations have begun to look for MSP’s who can offer end-to-end services for systems and mobile device management.

Create Awareness: MSPs have to play an active role educating the users on the security issues that are involved in device management and how the MSPs can address those needs.

As a consultant, MSPs must understand users’ challenges and suggest solutions that can address such challenges. For instance, a few of the pain points for customers could be data security, Information access and provisioning of BYOD. Find out the area of concern and start a conversation to clear their doubts and questions and propose the right solution.

Pricing and Packaging strategy:

Most medium-sized MSPs limit their service portfolio to desktop management/anti-virus management or patch management services. There are several other services like mobile device management and content management which may have not yet been explored.

The biggest issue for most of the organizations is data security in device management. Create a package with different layers of features. Introduce an integrated management package that can help in managing both desktops and mobile devices. A basic package could contain maximum desktop management features and necessary device management features like security management including pass-code policy, remote lock and data wipe, etc.

Flexible packaging: The service package should be designed with 80 percent of the core features such as security management and 20 percent of add on features such as application management. MSPs can additionally offer layers such as mobile application management, profile configuration or report generation and package them as an advanced edition.

The advantage lies in expanding the service portfolio and this expansion lets MSPs seek new opportunities to increase revenue, while using the expertise they gained by managing specific verticals.

Pricing: Create a value based pricing strategy, thereby letting the customers perceive the importance of services that MSPs offer. For instance, create different editions of price points, each variant with its distinctive offerings/features along with desktop management features that should be available in every variant.

For example, one variant could have necessary security management, and another variant could have added on modules such as application management. These different size packages can increase the MSPs chances to serve customers of different sizes.

To grab opportunities in today’s market, MSPs should study and analyze future trends to understand how growth in the mobile industry is going to affect them, how to address the changing nature of the client needs, how the workload from the Enterprises and organizations is going to affect them .This knowledge will help MSPs address the rising challenges at the client end.

Vijay Saradhi, is a Marketing Analyst at ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp, where he manages the product marketing for its Desktop & Mobile Device Managementsolution offering.He has expertise on IT services and product with an experience of 4 years. You can reach him on LinkedIn or follow his tweets at: @vijaysarathi12