Seven Managed Services Blogs MSPmentor Didn’t Write: June 4

I’ve returned home from the Kaseya Connect User Conference, and I’ll be heading off to the Ingram Micro Cloud and Seismic Partner conferences on June 6. In between, here are seven managed services blog entries MSPmentor didn’t have a chance to write for the week ending June 4, 2010.

7. MSPs Still Loving SonicWall?: Nearly 40 percent of our MSPmentor 100 survey participants leverage SonicWall‘s security solutions. That’s a pretty impressive figure (based on our Oct-Dec. 2009 survey results). But I wonder how MSPs are feeling about SonicWall being acquired by a private equity firm this week?

6. Early Registration: During the first day of registration, more than 260 partners signed up to attend ConnectWise IT Nation (formerly ConnectWise Partner Summit), scheduled for November 4-6 in Orlando. I suspect many of the initial registrants are HTG Peer Group members, who will be attending both the ConnectWise conference and an HTG event that week in Orlando. Also, here’s a theory on why ConnectWise changed the conference name. Meanwhile, ConnectWise rival Tigerpaw Software has announced the agenda for their first partner and customer conference (Oct. 6-8, Dallas).

5. Career Moves: Lots of career move chatter at the Kaseya Connect User Conference. Sounds like vendors and MSPs see the economy improving and several prominent names could have new careers within a few months. Also, watch for more folks to follow the leads of Michael Cooch and Travis Austin. Cooch and Austin both continue to lead their respective MSP businesses, but they’ve branched off to launch new projects (Kutenda and MSPintegrations, respectively). Similar moves are coming.

4. Sweet Concept?: About five years ago a major RMM (remote management and monitoring) provider considered leveraging SugarCRM to build a PSA (professional services automation) alternative to Autotask and ConnectWise. An executive involved in the old brainstorm says he’s surprised a major PSA and RMM merger hasn’t occurred, though he concedes many PSA and RMM companies are led by strong entrepreneurial personalities who may not want to let go of control.

3. Distribution & the Cloud: Ingram Micro seems to be cooking up a cloud strategy that may involve Salesforce.com, Rackspace and Microsoft — among other giants. The VAR Guy speculates a bit about Ingram Micro’s plans here. But I expect firm details on June 7 or so at the Ingram Micro Cloud and Ingram Micro Seismic Partner Conferences.

2. Competition Intensifies: In case you missed it, Kaseya is quietly preparing a lower-cost managed services platform called G1. It’s meant as a stepping stone to the next-generation Kaseya 2 platform. But multiple sources tell me G1 is simply a response to aggressive competition from Labtech Sofware — the RMM provider funded by ConnectWise Capital. For its part, I hear Labtech is beta testing a migration tool that may help MSPs to jump from Kaseya and other platforms to Labtech.

1. Microsoft’s Growing Cloud: Microsoft says it now has more than 10,000 customers on the Windows Azure cloud platform. How many individual users does that represent? And how many channel partners were involved in those deployments? We’ll be looking for answers in the days ahead.

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