MSPmentor 250: Jennifer Anaya’s ‘Closet to Cloud’ Approach

Sometimes a personal-life decision can lead to the career change of a lifetime. Just ask Jennifer Anaya, vice president of corporate marketing at NetEnrich Inc. and member of the MSPmentor 250. Anaya was part of the Ingram Micro team that launched the Ingram Micro Services Division in 2007 before leaving the company in 2009. Today, she’s driving a closet-to-cloud strategy at NetEnrich, which offers NOC (network operation center) services to VARs and MSPs.

Anaya’s path from Ingram to NetEnrich was anything but a straight line. Back in 2009, “I had 4 ½ and six year-old daughters,” Anaya said. “I wanted to work from home and find that family/work balance.” So Anaya, the daughter of two entrepreneurs, followed her bloodline and started her own business. She assisted Ingram Micro, Autotask, and additional clients on branding, communications and channel strategies. One of those clients was NetEnrich.

“I saw with great opportunity with them [NetEnrich] and with managed service providers in general,” said Anaya, who joined NetEnrich in March 2011. Heading into 2011, NetEnrich was fully focused on network operations center (NOC) services. But Anaya and the NetEnrich executive team had a broader vision for the emerging cloud managed services market. Anaya Explains: “NetEnrich has a very unique, proprietary tech platform to deliver services to our MSP partners. We give those MSPs a view of the infrastructure that they manage.”

NetEnrich calls the new value position Closet to Cloud. “’Closet’ is a term for the data center,” Anaya explained. “Our belief is that as the cloud becomes more prevalent, more complexity will be added to MSPs. They will have to figure out how to manage all of the technology that exists in different places. So giving MSPs an easy way to handle the complexity is really critical.”

Contrary to some skeptics, Anaya believes that the future for MSPs in the cloud is very bright: “I think MSPs are in the right place at the right time as far as cloud is concerned because they already have a recurring revenue strategy. The cloud is a pay-per-use monthly revenue model, and MSPs are already designed to deliver on that. Smart MSPs already have a consulting model built-in.”

NetEnrich is out to prove that MSPs will flourish in a cloud environment. The company has roughly 250 MSP partners and plans to reach 400 by the end of 2011. “I know it sounds cliché, but service is the killer app,” Anaya said. “We want to make MSPs more profitable by showing them new ways to manage and deliver their services more efficiently and at a lower cost.”