Life after LogMeIn Free: A Channel Perspective

For those of us at LogMeIn, January certainly was an interesting month.  Yes, we faced our fair share of heat from some disappointed LogMeIn Free users, and yes, we also heard from a pretty vocal group of confused channel partners, too.  “Why would you get rid of LogMeIn Free?” most asked.  “And why now?!”  The simple answer to both is, “We did it for you.”       

Before we get into that, let me clear up one point of confusion.  If you have LogMeIn Central — most of our channel partners do — ‘Free’ lives on, and even better, it’s all yours.  You see, as a Central user you can continue to add new LogMeIn Free hosts on your customer sites to remotely access and manage computers.  You can even use Central to offer your customers access to Free.  That’s right. What used to be our freemium model – and unfortunately too often your competition — is now yours and yours alone.  And since very few small business end users have Central, our channel partners are now in a position where they can offer remote access services on their terms. 

Put another way, channel partners no longer need to compete with a product that is perceived to be free, and therefore essentially unbillable.

Enjoy it.  Go win some new business.  Call us if you need any help moving people over. 

But that’s really only one tiny part of the story.  The big ‘why’ is that this move was done because we wanted to focus our resources on key areas that best address the evolving needs of our customers. 

We are focused on supporting the IT Professional.  We are interested in driving more value to the business community.  Commitment to our channel partners is at the top of that list. 

In the coming weeks and months, we’re going to unveil some incredible new software that will change the way you work with your customers. These will include an expanded set of IT offerings that will help you create new managed services for your customers, to new versions of our popular productivity and collaboration apps, designed with both you and your customers in mind.  These are products that you can use to drive both new customer engagement and increase monthly revenue from your existing base, and enjoy some excellent margins. 

We believe this is what you should expect from a world class channel program, and what you deserve as world class partners.  We are looking forward to growing with you this year.

Ted Roller is vice president of Channel Development at LogMeIn. This guest blog is part of MSPmentor’s Platinum Sponsorship Program.