By Dan Wensley 1

As an IT professional who runs an SP business servicing the SMB, SME or ENT market, you might be pondering what’s next in 2015 after the evolution to MSP. 

Well, so far we’ve evolved from being a VAR by adopting new technologies and business models such as an RMM, that monitors IPs via DHCP, to manage PCs and MFPs, sometimes referred to as MFDs, which rely on MIBS through SNMP or SNMTP. All of this now integrated into your PSA while also supporting your new BDR services.

You might still be debating if you should become an MPP but are now looking at new internal operation improvement solutions including PWM and SSO.

Plans to add new services in 2015 included UC, AV, POS, ERP or VS, after reading an article in TVG. But your concern about HIPPA and SOX compliance makes you feel like you have permanent PMS, regardless of your S-E-X.

None of this has been easy … you’ve attended more VOD sessions then you care to remember, you get all the RSS feeds your LT and MD can handle. You’ve gone to every RR boot camp, studied IPED data, been a participating ASCII member, and have only missed one HTG meeting.

Marketing and growth remains a focus, but is it SEO, SEM, PPC or S-P-A-M that will provide the most leads and ROI?

Last week you read a B-L-O-G about adding outsourced HD and NOC services to our SD portfolio.

Luckily, we have great peers in the industry like MJ (ok, that’s his name and doesn’t count) who in 2014 got on the cover of BSM to help guide the way.

And then just when we thought we were all getting ahead in 2014 … along comes MDM.

Your customers are asking about their BB users who love their BBM but the BES needs an upgrade, and if they all go to iOS am I SOL? Should employees be allowed to BYOD? Followed by a debate on the use of GPS tracking … Frankly, all you can do is LOL. However, after a long conversation with a PDM you decided to take on MDM services in 2015.

Meanwhile, your competitors all seem to be involved in M&A activity and you look to secure vendor MDF so you can sell more, but realize it may take VC funding to accomplish. But the last time you hired salespeople, you ran into HR issues after the summit in Vegas.

As a member of the CompTIA BOD, I would be remiss if I didn’t also encourage you join a CEB meeting in 2015. And don’t forget about AMM in March.

To conclude … whatever your plans for 2015, just make sure it’s done in the cloud and ASAP. 

That’s 69 acronyms if you give me a couple including “MJ.” Have a great 2015 😉