The managed service marketplace continues to change rapidly. The majority of service providers address the needs of small and mid-size companies who struggle to afford or find the necessary IT skills to support new technologies. Virtualization, cloud services and the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce, for example, place significant demands on already stretched SMB IT resources.
Service providers help by offloading the day-to-day monitoring and management of existing infrastructures, but as customers seek to adopt these new capabilities, managed services offerings must adapt too. Over time, revenues from traditional monitoring services are likely to decline as customers migrate applications hosted in-house to those hosted on cloud services. Offering higher value advanced services not only helps to overcome the potential revenue loss, it also helps MSPs differentiate and grow their businesses more profitably by providing greater customer value.
Apart from greater marketplace differentiation, the benefits of delivering higher value services include bigger and more profitable deals as well as greater customer satisfaction.
Advanced services require the ability to deploy a proactive service level monitoring system that monitors all aspects of a customer’s hybrid cloud environment, including the core internal network infrastructure, virtualized servers, storage, and both internal and cloud-based applications and resources. Predictive monitoring services help ensure uptime and higher service levels via proactive and reliable notification of potential issues. Advanced remedial actions should include support not only for rapid response when the circumstances warrant, but also for regular customer reviews to discuss longer term configuration changes, additional resource requirements (e.g. storage), policy changes and so on, based on predictive SLA compliance trend reports.
Beyond advanced monitoring, professional skill sets are also very important, particularly when it comes to managing new cloud-based applications services. The ability to scale to support larger customers requires tools that simplify the complexity of potential issues and reduce the mean time to resolution. Without the right tools, complex issues require the skills of several experts – server, database, network, application etc. – thus making it difficult for businesses to scale as the infrastructure and the business grows. Tools that can quickly identify root causes across network and application layers are vital.
Cloud customers are increasingly reliant on their managed service providers to “fix” problems with their cloud services, whether it be performance issues, printing issues, integration issues, etc. Getting a rapid response from cloud service providers who have “thousands of other customers who are working just fine” is hard to do, especially as they know problems are more likely caused by customer infrastructure issues than by theirs. When addressing these issues, savvy MSPs use learning tools to capture and share experiences internally in order to turn them into repeatable processes and valuable services for other customers.
Automation is another must-have for advanced service providers. Again, scalability depends on being able to do as much as possible with as few resources as possible. For infrastructure management, automation can help with service and application monitoring as well as network configuration management. Monitoring with application-aware solutions is an attractive proposition for specific applications. For the rest, it helps to be able to establish performance analytics against key performance indicators and diagnostic monitoring of end-user transaction experiences. For network management, the ability to quickly compare network configurations and revert back to earlier working versions is one of the fastest ways to improve mean time to repair. Automating patch management and policy management for desktops and servers also results in significant manpower savings.
Finally, tools that help manage cloud service usage are also invaluable as customers adopt more and more cloud services. Just as on-premise license management is an issue for larger organizations, so cloud service management is also an issue. Access to email accounts and collaborative applications is not only a security issue, it’s also a cost and potentially a performance issue.
Developing advanced services requires a combination of the right skills, resources, processes and technology; in effect, a higher level of organizational maturity. Larger customers tend to develop greater levels of process and IT maturity themselves in order to manage their own growing IT environment. When they turn to a managed service provider for help they expect at least an equivalent level of service provider maturity.
Having the right tools does not guarantee success in the competitive MSP marketplace, but can help MSPs create and differentiate more advanced services, demonstrate the ability to support customer-required SLAs, and scale to support larger and more profitable customers.
About the author: Ray Wright is a high tech industry and marketing expert with over 20 years’ experience marketing to and through MSPs and resellers. He blogs at blog.kaseya.com and elsewhere and contributes frequently to social media and community discussions.