Seven Managed Services Blog Entries We Didn’t Write: March 19
Another week has flown by. Missed deadlines. Dropped cell phone calls. Delayed video posts. Boy, I’m on a roll. Kidding aside, here are seven managed services blog entries that MSPmentor didn’t have time to write for the week ending March 19, 2010.
7. Quick Engagement, Now the Marriage: Only one week after announcing a $350 million deal, CA has completed its buyout of Nimsoft. Now the real fun — and the real work — starts. I’ll be curious to see if CA influences Nimsoft’s annual user conferences (called n-fluence) set for April 6-8 in San Francisco and April 20-22 in London. Also, I’ll be watching to see how CA promotes Nimsoft at CAWorld (May 16-20, Las Vegas). Most importantly, I’ll be checking in with Nimsoft MSPs for their views on CA’s strategy.
6. Smarter MSPs: Tigerpaw Software, the PSA (professional services automation) software provider, launched Journal Connect for Outlook. The software integrates Microsoft Outlook email into an MSP’s historical notes — so that the MSP gets a clearer view of correspondence with customers and prospects.
5. Let’s Play 2 (or 3): MSP coach Stuart Selbst recently completed his Spring Training for Business conference in Arizona. Next, he may host a similar event in Canada and perhaps an employee-focused MSP event on the East Coast.
4. Less Shelfware, More Success: There’s some chatter from N-able that a greater and greater percentage of its licenses are active rather than sitting on the shelf. I’ll be searching for more answers next week. Also, I’ve completed a video interview with N-able CEO Gavin Garbutt… now I just need to edit and publish it.
3. MSP Megatrends: Level Platforms CEO Peter Sandiford is back with the latest chapter of his 7 megatrends blog series for MSPs. This one involves SaaS and cloud trends. I’m still skeptical that MSPs will make a buck monitoring Microsoft BPOS and other SaaS applications for customers. After all, don’t customers just expect Microsoft and Google applications to stay online? Still, there’s room in this market — somewhere — for MSPs and VARs to profit from SaaS and cloud.
2. Playing an Encore?: Now that Autotask has discussed its takeover strategy for VARStreet, imagine the following scenario: A closer working relationship between Autotask and OnForce. In theory, a VAR or MSP could have a single dashboard to (A) bid on customer projects via OnForce (B), source the customer products from VARStreet then (C) manage the project using Autotask.
Yes, Autotask and OnForce have already done some work together. And OnForce CEO Peter Cannone attended the 2009 Autotask Community Live event. But multiple sources across the industry tell me more Autotask-OnForce work is coming. Soon.
1. Rise of Cloud Integrators?: Actually, this is a blog we did get around to writing. We’re hearing a lot of hype about so-called Cloud Integrators. But is the hype real? Here’s some analysis.
Thanks for your readership and all the chatter you generate on MSPmentor.
Sign up for MSPmentor’s weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. And follow us via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.
Joe,
Your skepticism about managing the cloud would make sense if this was in fact the sole objective. Cloud applications do not exist in their own little universe (although many cloud vendors seem to think this is the case). They operate in the context of the entire IT infrastructure.
In fact even stand alone applications like Google Apps depend on a properly functioning network and PC (or equivalent) to deliver the intended experience. The next generation of enterprise applications that share data from local servers and other cloud applications have multiple points of failure and represent an even bigger opportunity.
Ryan’s reply to your post on Google Apps says it perfectly (see below). The MSP’s opportunity is “to provide a 0 maintenance option”. In part this means monitoring to detect issues, diagnosing the problem and taking responsibility to fix it, communicating with the end customer and providing detailed reporting to justify the monthly cost.
The only way MSPs can deliver their business in the future is to monitor the cloud along with all the other related IT that delivers the end customer experience.
Peter
http://www.levelplatforms.com
One Comment on “Found: A Different Path to Google Apps Profits”
1.Ryan Bilesky Says:
March 22nd, 2010 at 1:15 pm
That indeed is quite innovative, though we can’t all write the same tool, and some of us indeed don’t have the skill set to write any addon tool. The way I have added more to my apps revenue is though addon services:
* Implementation and Migration
* Management
* Support
Each of these services can be upsold on-top of Google Apps and you retain the full value of and if done right makes Google Apps a 0 maintenance option for them and a recurring revenue stream for you.
Peter: Thanks for the additional insights. So, cloud monitoring becomes part of a virtual CIO offering or virtual IT department from the MSP, rather than a break-out, line-item offering? Thoughts? I know I’m over-simplifying the discussion (but I have a bad/good habit of doing that).
Best,
-jp