Coming Soon: The Ultimate MSP Emergency Plan?
Imagine the following business scenario: A hurricane knocks your managed services business offline. Your family suffers personal losses during the storm. And your customers are also in the dark. Could your business survive as you scramble to put the pieces of your own life back together? Instead of pressing the panic button, MSPs that participate in HTG Peer Groups will soon have an emergency help line. Here are some preliminary details.
During an HTG Dallas meeting scheduled for May, the peer group is expected to unveil an emergency fund to help members through times of crisis. Each HTG member will contribute to the fund, which could be tapped in the event of a member emergency — potentially funding travel or other expenses to help MSPs assist one another amid a crisis. Hardware and software companies are also expected to contribute resources to the effort.
HTG Founder Arlin Sorensen described the effort to me this week during a sit-down at the HP Americas Partner Conference in Las Vegas. Instead of talking cloud computing and managed services, we spent considerable time discussing a familiar Sorensen theme: Life-work balance, and giving rather than receiving.
During previous emergency situations, HTG Peer Group members have chipped in to help one another, with some members incurring out-of-pocket travel expenses and lost time in their own businesses. In some cases, the MSP in need may have declined help for reasons of pride. But the forthcoming fund should help those in need to accept the peer assistance without feelings of guilt, Sorensen noted.
Of course, I’m skipping a bunch of details:
- How much with member MSPs contribute annually?
- What types of commitments will hardware and software companies make to the effort?
- Which emergency situations will warrant tapping the fund?
Instead of posing those questions to Sorensen earlier this week I simply listened. I liked the concept and figured I could wait to hear deeper details when they surface at the HTG Dallas gathering in May.
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JP, this is great news for MSPs and leave it to HTG to blaze a new trail of value for IT service providers out there.
Stuart Crawford
Stuart: As Arlin described a few details to me I remember thinking, “who dreams up this stuff?” And of course the answer was sitting right across from me.
-jp
I like the concept. I like the self-insurance / self-reliance thought process behind the whole thing. Thumbs-up to the HTG’ers. They are innovators. We’re in Florida. So, back during the Hurricane Years, we had our fair share of storm troubles.
Here’s CRN article from 2004…
http://www.crn.com/news/storage/47900129/surviving-frances.htm
We made a lot of quick moves to stay up and running in those days. Today, our operations are completely decentralized with people in various parts of Florida as well as GA, TN, CT and NY. Besides our managed services tools, we are on-boarding at least two clients per month onto our private virtual infrastructure, so downtime becomes ultra-unacceptable. All of our systems have to be in data centers, everything has to be redundant and geographically diverse. But we haven’t forgotten the day the outter-most layer blew off of our roof and we had leaks every four feet… Cheers!
Rory: Thanks for sharing those details re: your own recovery and decentralization efforts. So have you also leveraged third-party data centers up and down the east coast, too?
-jp
Yes. We are currently leveraging third-party data centers in Atlanta, as well as two in South Florida. The South Florida ones are built to withstand hurricanes, feed off redundant power grids, have battery banks, generators, fuel for weeks and even their own fuel truck, in case they need to go get more and the fuel delivery people are unavailable. Now that we’re doing more business in the northeast, we’re exploring expanding our footprint in that direction, as well.
Cheers
– Rory
Rory: Thanks for the strategy update. Some readers have been asking me if the industry is going to suffer from a data center bubble because of all the excess capacity (like fiber excesses around 1999/2000). But all that excess data center capacity lowers the barrier to entry for small MSPs that want to offer customers redundancy, I believe…
-jp