Monday, October 31, 2011

Becoming an MSP

I have been at three shows recently that have urged Agents, VAR's and others to morph into an MSP (managed service provider). Last week in Atlanta, Presilient gave a presentation on making an MSP out of an Agent. Basically, data backup is the first service for an MSP to sell. There are many choices for vendors from Mozy, Carbonite to Qwest (who has been selling Hosted Storage for 3 years). Or you can DIY.

One way to sell data storage is through an assessment of storage goals, compliance, and best practices.

Presilient also offers monitoring of the hardware, LAN and WAN. MSP's utilize PSA software like Tigerpaw, Kaseya, ConnectWise and Zenith Infotech to offer monitoring is an MSP product.

MSP's are also offering hosted VoIP, SIP trunking, MPLS networking, conferencing, email (like MS Exchange) and software packages (Sharepoint and others) mainly to small to medium-sized business (SMB’s).

Migrating from a break/fix model to a maintenance contract is the key to the MSP business model. Who doesn't love MRR (monthly recurring revenue)?

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