Ingram Micro Seismic: “All Is Well”
It’s day 2 at the Ingram Micro Seismic Partner Conference in Dallas. Ingram Micro VP Justin Crotty is delivering his keynote to roughly 275 managed service providers at the moment. His key point, lifted from Kevin Bacon: Remain calm. All is well in the MSP market. Here are some other highlights.
Ingram Micro Seismic is a master MSP of sorts, offering a portfolio of service options to MSPs and VARs.
State of the Market
The state of the MSP market, according to Crotty, is as follows:
- All is well
- Most MSPs report growth
- Value proposition is relevant
- Market is accepting
- Sales cycles longer
- Pricing pressure
I am interviewing Crotty later today and plan to ask him about the pricing pressure bullet: How significant is the pressure and how are MSPs fighting back?
Growth Continues
Growth stats, according to Crotty:
- Seismic grew 158% in 2008
- Partner numbers doubled during the year
- Over 1000 MSPs leverage Seismic to go to market
- Q1 of 2009 saw 135% growth
Today’s Buzz
New announcements from Crotty:
- Seismic Global NOC (powered by NetEnrich): A 24×7 NOC service that counters Zenith Infotech.
- Seismic Instant Recovery on Demand (powered by CA)
- Seismic Epicenter: A free tool for all Seismic partners. First step is a single portal for managing all Seismic tools. Future versions will allow you to provision services and look at billing and invoicing per user.
- Seismic Business Intelligence Dashboard: Measures health of customer equipment, and also compares you against the Seismic universe of hosted partners.
Crotty also noted that some MSPs have shelf-ware challenges. In one example, an MSP has 52% of licenses that are still sitting on the shelf. This is becoming a concerning theme for me in the managed services market — especially as some vendors shift from on-premise to SaaS solutions.I’ll be exploring the shelf-ware theme more later today. In the meantime, Crotty’s keynote continues. Stay tuned for updates
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