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 Channel Futures

Sales & Marketing


Managed Services Blend With Corporate IT Departments

  • Written by Joe Panettieri 1
  • August 10, 2009
When it comes to managed services, Waka Digital Media Corp. is breaking with tradition. Instead of competing with corporate IT, the Amherst, Mass.-based managed service provider is partnering up with corporate IT directors. Could this be the start of a larger managed services trend?

msps-and-corporate-itWhen it comes to managed services, Waka Digital Media Corp. is breaking with tradition. Instead of competing with corporate IT, the Amherst, Mass.-based managed service provider is partnering up with corporate IT directors. Could this be the start of a larger managed services trend?

Let’s start with the situation at Waka Digital. In recent months, President and COO Jacob Braun has been searching for a way to more effectively engage corporate IT departments. His goal was to have corporate IT managers outsource IT administration tasks to Waka Digital.

Braun needed a way to coordinate and manage trouble tickets between his customer sites and his own MSP business. He ultimately standardized on Autotask’s TaskFire, which manages the flow of trouble tickets between internal IT service desks and external IT service providers.

During a conversation at CompTIA Breakaway 2009, Braun told me he’s betting his business on a blended model, linking internal corporate IT departments to his company’s external managed services.

Is this the start of a larger industry trend? Perhaps. N-able, for instance, directs all of its mid-market sales leads to managed service providers. The MSPs, in turn, can either propose an external managed service or install N-able’s software on-site for the mid-market customer.

Pros and Cons

Still, MSPs face cultural and perception hurdles as they push deeper into the midmarket.

Some MSPs position themselves as complete replacements for corporate IT — scheduling meetings only with CXO leaders and bluntly stating that they can replace an organization’s IT leadership.

Other MSPs like Waka Digital Media attempt to coexist with corporate IT departments. During sales and consulting meetings with CXOs, Braun insists that the target customer’s IT director is present. Braun’s goal is to position Waka Digital Media as a partner that can take on mundane day-to-day IT tasks, leaving the corporate IT director to focus on innovation.

Clearly, there’s more than one path to MSP success. I’m curious to see where the majority of MSPs wind up a year from now: Partnering with corporate IT — or competing with it.

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Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Best Practices Sales & Marketing

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5 comments

  1. Avatar Peter Sandiford August 10, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
    Reply

    Collaboration between MSPs, end customers and other specialized services providers is one of the big trends in the evolution of the managed services business. Level Platforms addresses this in a number of ways.

    1. Extensive point and click assignment of roles and permissions allowing complete allocation of tasks and views all consolidated on the dashboard of the administrator.

    2. Complete synchronization of PSA (Autotask, Connectwise, Tiger Paw etc.) and corporate or NOC help desk systems so that alerts and cases can be handled by any service provider with updated cases and alerts all linked through our extensive two way API integrations.

    3. Free extra Service Center licenses to all new MSPs encouraging them to deploy the Service Center to provide Managed Workplace to larger partners as their internal IT management system allowing the MSP to have access to the devices and applications they sell and support as well as generate revenues for licensing and supporting the system as well as great insight into new customer opportunities.

    Level Platforms Partners have been deploying this model for almost two years and welcome the added additional opportunity made possible as the PSA products join us in this exciting market opportunity.

    Peter Sandiford
    http://www.levelplatforms.com

  2. Avatar Paul Barnett August 11, 2009 @ 10:18 am
    Reply

    A smart play Jacob.

    Paul Barnett
    Virtual Administrator

  3. Avatar Lane Smith August 11, 2009 @ 4:11 pm
    Reply

    I am actually surprised to see that this article is news. I don’t believe that an MSP should ever represent themselves as a 100% IT outsource solution. There are two main reasons for this.

    1. If you do this you alienate any internal IT that your prospects might have and generally eliminate them as a prospect.
    2. No one can every provide a truly 100% outsource IT solution. The reason for this is simple, the customer will always have to be a part of their IT solution whether it is just a strategic role or a hands on role (in the case where they have internal IT).

    We generally coach our partners to represent themselves as a strategic IT partner for their customers. While capable of providing the majority of their IT requirements to suggest any agreement requires a partnership and not an outsource.

    Interestingly the value proposition to a company with no internal IT and a company with an internal IT is very similar.

    No Internal IT – “Provide a stable and secure environment coupled with immediate support to increase your employee productivity and allow you to focus on your business”.

    With an Internal IT – Same value to the owners, but to the IT people. “We handle all of the day-to-day so that you can increase your IT staff productivity and focus on your business (by focusing on strategic IT initiatives vs. putting out fires).”

    One term that I have used with a few partners that seems to fit this is, a “co-source IT partner”.

  4. Avatar Joe Panettieri August 11, 2009 @ 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Hey Lane: I realize quite a few MSPs work closely with corporate IT. But it looks like the next step, described by Waka Digital Media Corp., involves blending MSP tools with corporate IT tools so that everyone is working from the same playbook.

    Side note: I like your term “co-source IT partner”

  5. Avatar Lane Smith August 11, 2009 @ 6:43 pm
    Reply

    Ahh ok, that makes a bit more since. I am very excited to see Autotask announce their Taskfire solution. This is something that we have been doing with our IT Service Management tool for many years, and has certainly won us a lot of business over the competition. If you are not doing this then you need to. Why would an IT department partner with an MSP that uses a completely different service management platform than them. Without this there is no one central view of IT issues which is one of the many value ads of partnering with an MSP.

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