Our company was one of the first IT service providers in our area to embrace the change from on-prem to cloud hosted email. It gave us a surprising advantage in the local market as prospects were itching to cut expenses and were already familiar with the concept of “the cloud” due to a tremendous amount of marketing around the subject.
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.
The lack of women and minorities in the channel is such a complex problem. We can’t keep forgetting about diversifying the channel – it has to be an ongoing conversation about how our industry can find better ways to recruit talented women and minorities and help them advance to leadership positions.
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.
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.
As cloud storage becomes more affordable, organizations of all sizes are exploring new ways to meet their increased storage demands and streamline operations. This steady decline in cost and improvements in security have made cloud storage a viable alternative to traditional on-premises storage options.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that specialize in vertical markets offer an in-depth understanding and knowledge of the systems and processes for each type of business or organization. With solid expertise gained in a vertical sector, MSPs can differentiate from the competition as market experts who can provide clients the guidance and solutions that align to their specific industry needs.
How do I differentiate my business from my competitors? This is a question that many managed service providers (MSPs) are battling with. One potentially successful approach is to specialize in a particular vertical market. By focusing on vertical markets, you acquire specific knowledge and expertise about the objectives, processes, and IT issues related to that type of business. You become an expert and specialist rather than a generalist, which enables you to solve problems more effectively and to offer a more relevant mix of products and services. Eventually, you will be able to leverage your specialist expertise and add greater value to your customers than your competitors.
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.
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.
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.
HTG is an international consulting, coaching and peer group organization that cultivates success by igniting personal, leadership, business and legacy transformation. Members navigate their journey with world-class HTG consultants and facilitators who value sharing wisdom, providing accountability and building meaningful relationships, Igniting Transformation™ every step of the way. HTG invites you to explore the program that suits you best, and apply today to begin experiencing The HTG Way.
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.
CompTIA is the voice of the world's information technology (IT) industry.
Our company was one of the first IT service providers in our area to embrace the change from on-prem to cloud hosted email. It gave us a surprising advantage in the local market as prospects were itching to cut expenses and were already familiar with the concept of “the cloud” due to a tremendous amount of marketing around the subject.
Whether you want to start your own business as a managed service provider or you already run a small company providing IT services, you may find yourself at a crossroads trying to identify the best operating model and the steps you need to do immediately to get everything running. The aim of this article is to offer an introduction to two main types of MSP operating models and give you some practical advice on MSP business management.
It is a well-known fact that the cost of acquiring new customers for managed service providers is several times higher than the cost of retaining existing ones. If you keep your clients happy in the long-term, and if you provide them with reliable services and great IT support, there will be no reason for them to leave you, and thus they will continue regular payouts.
How about a quick show of virtual hands — who loves meetings? Immortalized in countless movies, poorly run meetings are the bane of anyone’s work day. Many meetings — even in small business — are boring, ineffective, and wasteful. The good news is we can fix this, together.
AI and ML are not the same thing. Marketing campaigns and news articles oftentimes confuse people into thinking that they are—and my insistence on clarifying their nuance might be overkill—but I think it’s important to know the difference so you can understand how each can help make cybersecurity stronger.
