Every day, technology firms must respond to changing client needs and market conditions, attract new business, and react to other evolving challenges. Given this constant state of churn, it can be all too easy to lose sight of a broader strategy.
I spent a few days in Dallas last week with my friends at HTG. I try to attend as many of the group’s quarterly meetings as I can, because there’s no better place to become immersed in the MSP community. Honest and transparent conversations with the leaders of operationally mature—and actively maturing—managed services businesses are what direct our MSP Insights and Channel Executive editorial content.
There’s been no shortage of press about the IT labor situation in India. In case you haven’t been following, here’s a quick summation. The country’s outsourced IT shops are like our brick-and-mortar stores. There are too many of them. They’re occupied by too many employees for the times. They both face threats posed by automation and Amazon, respectively, nemeses whose names are nearly synonymous.
As VAR and MSP sales and marketing organizations catch the buyer persona buzz, are client personas and user experiences being overlooked?
The PCI Security Standards Council’s announcement of plans to strategically drive its QIR (Qualified Integrators and Resellers) program deeper into the SMB retail market is by most counts a positive thing for the industry. For the greater good of data security, it’s hard to muster a qualm about moves like these. It’s a little easier to be annoyed by these changes if you’ve been going out of your way to differentiate your business via a payment security consultancy.
When James Laszko founded Mythos Technology in 2010 he likely didn’t expect he’d be able to afford to fire the lowest performing 20 percent of his customers in 2018. But that’s exactly what he has set out to do this year. You can read more about his customer rightsizing initiative in the May 2018 issue of Channel Executive magazine. In the meantime, there is another side to the Mythos story: how to find the customers who are the right fit so they won’t end up on the chopping block a few years down the road.
It may be easier in the short-term for an MSP to standardize on one cloud provider, but a multi-cloud sales strategy is the more lucrative option in the long run.
Doug Grimm sat down with MSPinsights and VARinsights to talk about the biggest tech opportunity for MSPs and VARs.
Jim Hocking sat down with MSPinsights to talk about MSP pricing and the most common mistake he sees MSPs make when it comes to pricing their services.
Dreading your company’s annual kick-off because you can’t really show how your channel is performing – and suffering from a lack of ideas on how to truly accelerate your indirect revenue? You’re not alone. These are common symptoms of having selected the wrong channel management solution.
When IT service providers become MSPs, the transition isn’t always easy. It requires a fundamental change in the way business is done. What you sell—and what you shouldn’t sell—needs to be clearly considered if success is part of your plan.
While any business that wants to stay afloat must regularly balance monetary costs against benefits, it is especially important for smaller businesses with more limited budgets to thoroughly vet their return on investment (ROI) before purchasing a new product or service. And, depending on budget constraints, many decisions must be made with potential risk in mind. For example, if the likelihood that a business would need a very specific type of costly insurance is extremely low, then there’s no point in wasting time or resources on that insurance, right?
Cybercriminals are increasingly shifting their sites from enterprises to SMBs, which creates both an opportunity and a challenge for IT service providers. The opportunity is managed security services. They are a great way for MSPs to deliver the protection their customers are looking for while also growing and differentiating their business. However, knowing what security services their customers need and effectively delivering them on an SMB budget can be challenging.
Datto surveyed roughly 2,300 managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide about their day-to-day lives. The result: a wealth of statistics about the state of today’s MSPs, including everything from basic demographics and media consumption preferences to business goals and challenges.
Shif4 Payments is a leading national provider of touch-screen point of sale (POS) systems and payment processing services. As pioneers of the "as a service" model, Shif4 Payments offers an unprecedented "free" POS program that allows the company's sales partners to offer a full-featured POS system with no up-front costs.
SherWeb has been helping businesses around the world work smarter in the cloud since 1998. Our cloud solutions help companies be more agile in today’s competitive market and trim IT costs.
SolarWinds® MSP delivers comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to empower MSPs of every size and scale worldwide to create highly efficient and profitable businesses that drive a measurable competitive advantage.
VIPRE is the highest-rated, award-winning internet security product for channel partners and businesses worldwide. It consistently earns 100% block rates and zero false positives from AV-Comparatives, the world’s most widely-trusted independent antivirus testing authority.
Datto protects business data and provides secure connectivity for tens of thousands of the world's fastest growing companies. Datto's Total Data Protection solutions deliver uninterrupted access to business data on site, in transit and in the cloud. Thousands of IT service providers globally rely on Datto's combination of pioneering technology and dedicated services to ensure businesses are always on, no matter what. Datto is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut and has offices in Rochester, Boston, Portland, Toronto, London, Singapore and Sydney. Learn more at www.datto.com.
IT Glue is an award-winning documentation platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help your MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, we can help increase your efficiency, and reduce onboarding times by even more. By eliminating wasted time from your business, IT Glue gives you more time to focus on what matters - growing your business.
Building documentation is strategic. It’s not simply about how much you document, but how well you document your information so that it offers the most value to both you and your client. It might seem tricky to master at first, but consider these three steps for building your documentation and you’ll quickly find yourself on the road to documentation success.
Solution providers have always looked to deliver the most stringent endpoint security offerings in order to protect their clients—but a solution that simply detects threats isn’t enough in a fast-paced, 24/7 economy. To be truly effective, today’s security platforms must also be designed for modern business needs.
Public WiFi is a growing part of everyday life. Whether people are at the coffee shop, hotel, airport, or doctor’s office, public WiFi is rapidly becoming a standard offering for businesses of all types. When your clients provide public WiFi, they have an obligation to protect users. But uncontrolled internet usage brings high risk.
Ready for a harsh truth? Your hardware and software alone won’t make clients value you as a long-term technology advisor. After all, clients can get similar technology products and services from most of your competitors.
Growing your business revolves around the success of your sales cycle, and all too often the quoting process results in tedious, pain-staking time being lost—time that could be better spent connecting with potential partners. Fortunately, with a powerful quote and proposal automation tool, you can enable your reps to optimize their time and sell more efficiently.
