While still nascent for many channel firms, emerging technologies are nonetheless generating tons of excitement and becoming a growing part of portfolios. That’s made abundantly clear in the findings of CompTIA’s recently published 7th State of the Channel research, where study respondents cite emerging tech as the No. 1 driver of change across the tech ecosystem.
If Geek Squad is a nursery school for MSPs, its founder Robert Stephens, is the headmaster. I sat down with Stephens in Phoenix last week at the SolarWinds Empower user conference. Among many interesting points in our conversation were exchanges about IT services marketing and pricing.
In February 2017, CIO Solutions lost a big account. So big, in fact, that it accounted for 40 percent of the MSP’s revenue. This isn’t a mom and pop shop IT Services provider we’re talking about – the account’s revenue brought in millions of dollars annually. Fast forward to September 2018, and CIO Solutions is gracing the cover of Channel Executive magazine. The company not only rebounded – it completed a successful acquisition and is in a strong position for future growth. We couldn’t fit this side story in the magazine, so instead we’re sharing the lessons learned from loss of a large customer in a web-exclusive feature.
The work my friend and colleague Abby Sorensen put into the IT Channel is paying dividends even after she shifted her focus to the greater software business community. Last week at its RetailNOW event, the Retail Solutions Providers Association’s Women-to-Women (W2W) Committee named her its 2018 Leader Of The Year. Committee Chair and business owner Kelli Stewart, owner/operations manager at Advanced Data Systems, bestowed the honors from the mainstage.
At the top of the New Year, ConnectWise and HTG Peer Groups collaboratively announced that the former was acquiring the latter. Among the HTG associate, member, and greater MSP communities, the news incited a lot of speculation about the future of the HTG empire led by Arlin Sorensen and family. This week, the speculation was put to rest. HTG is now IT Nation Evolve, a new brand that reflects the Arnie Bellini-inspired ConnectWise flavor of channel community building.
Men outnumber women in this industry by something on the order of 8 to 2, and the margin is even wider in the c-suite. By and large, we’re the ones approving salaries, greenlighting recruits, and setting the cultural tones of our companies. That requires us to be involved in solving the pay gap, recruiting more women into the field, and most importantly, driving cultures that demand equal respect across gender lines. None of that will happen if we’re not talking about it.
MSPs looking for a way in with CIOs should use integration opportunities as a conversation starter. Simply put, integration is one of the CIO’s biggest headaches: as businesses increase their cloud investments and move forward with digital transformation efforts, they are finding that getting everything to work together is a massive undertaking.
For MSPs, the traditional approach to cybersecurity focuses on defense and prevention, but as cybercriminals get bolder and more sophisticated, that’s no longer enough. What’s needed is a proactive security posture that MSPs can enforce with their clients using these nine best practices.
When MSPs seek out new tools and capabilities to add to their portfolio of managed services, they shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to benefit from the advice of their current vendors. Many, from my experience, still don’t. This is a marketplace small enough that many of us know one another very, very well. Successful vendors inevitably learn the lay of the land and get to know their neighbors, with most participating at the same annual MSP events around the country (which, even before a expo hall cocktail, have collegial atmospheres). Because of this, they usually possess a particularly deep knowledge of who operates out of the same wheelhouse as their own, but also – importantly – those vendors that offer adjacent and complementary solutions that will save MSPs (and their clients) headache 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.
Threats are everywhere, and endpoint security simply isn’t enough to keep your clients safe. Pairing domain name system (DNS) protection with endpoint security is a proactive way to prevent costly network attacks. Most clients, however, don’t understand the need for this added layer of security.
Change is the one constant in the IT world, and the way companies purchase and consume technology continues to transform and evolve. As customers continue to disrupt the IT value chain, a successful transition to cloud and hybrid models requires managed service providers (MSPs) to evolve their people, operations, and processes and employ advanced technology to secure their customers’ environments.
The Webroot Threat Research Team has analyzed the data from our customer base during the first half of 2018. This mid-year threat report not only shows the stats, but also tells the story behind the headlines. The bottom line from our observations: it has never been more important to implement a robust, effective, multi-layered and continuously evolving security approach to keep valuable data and systems secure.
Avast Business provides easy-to-manage, enterprise-grade security and network management solutions for SMBs and IT service providers. Backed by the largest, most globally dispersed threat detection network, the Avast Business security portfolio makes securing, managing, and monitoring complex, ever-changing IT environments easy and affordable.
Taylor Business Group is an executive coaching and peer group firm that focuses on IT Solution Providers and Copier Dealers. Founded in 2001, Taylor has brought efficiencies and higher profits to IT Solution Providers through a focused effort in delivering best practices to the Service Provider and Copier Dealer's service, sales and administrative functions.
CloudBerry Lab™ is a vendor for CloudBerry Backup, a leading cross-platform cloud backup and disaster recovery solution integrated with major public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and almost every S3-compatible or OpenStack based cloud storage service.
The ASCII Group is a vibrant community of independent MSPs, VARS and solution providers in North America. The organization offers members leveraged purchasing programs, education and training, knowledge sharing among peers, discounts on business services, and more. Founded in 1984 by Alan Weinberger, ASCII is the oldest and largest group of independent IT solution providers, integrators and VARS in the world.
| ConnectWise is the leading business management solution designed exclusively for technology organizations, such as IT solution providers, MSPs, software companies, hardware/software resellers, and System Integrators. |
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.
To run a successful IT company, you should pay specific attention to your marketing strategy and the means of attracting new leads to your business. In this article, we will review the main marketing spheres in which every MSP should be engaged.
If you’ve decided to start a managed service provider practice you may ask yourself: how do I sell my managed services to my prospects? You might be a very good technical specialist, but if you have no idea of how the sales process works it may be very difficult for you to bring your business to any significant level of profitability. According to a survey conducted by CloudBerry Lab in 2018, the most challenging aspect of the MSP business still is finding new clients and turning prospects into deals.
Take control of the internet and grow your bottom line.
What percent of your MSP is female? How about those in leadership positions at your MSP? Despite what we know about the importance of gender diversity in the workplace, the numbers are typically still quite low.
The Schrödinger’s backup is such a backup, that was not yet tested for a recovery. Having a full backup is essential for making sure you can recover everything, especially if you have a widespread system failure, compromised data, or even an employee error that leads to loss of a substantial part of your information. While traditional full backup methods used to be the only option for having a complete copy of your data, synthetic full backup is providing a new alternative.
