How to build a managed service

How to build a managed service provider business

As margins for hardware and software continue to fall, many resellers are moving toward providing services to stay profitable. These often include deployment or auditing services, but managed services -- monitoring and remote maintenance -- are an increasingly popular option, especially for value-added resellers (VARs) who target the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector. Although there isn't a clear consensus about exactly what an MSP is, MSPs generally monitor and fix clients' IT infrastructure remotely. Building a managed service provider (MSP) business out of an existing VAR or break-fix shop isn't always social media marketing university easy, but this Channel Business How-To will give you a head start. Many companies operate with a hybrid model, offering reselling or integration services in addition to managed services. With this model, the managed services offerings are essentially another line of business. Although companies often struggle to quantify exactly how much of their revenue comes from managed services, 73% of companies that offer managed services reported that those services were profitable, according to a CompTIA survey published in December 2006. Companies were more likely to report that they made a profit what is social media marketing from managed services if 50% of more of their revenues came from that line of business, the report found. So, if you decide to make the transition to an MSP model, dipping your toes into the business is not the approach to take. Before you start shifting your VAR business toward an MSP model, it's important to know the market. MSPs generally serve SMBs that have strained IT resources; the MSP's job is to handle day-to-day IT operations, freeing the client's staff to work on new projects instead of putting out fires. Clients often hire MSPs to provide networking or security services, storage and disaster recovery, and email or Web hosting.

Grow your Managed Services Business

If you run a managed services business, you’re presumably keen to build up your revenue and grow your business. When you think about growing a business, it’s natural to automatically consider ways of bringing more customers on board. However, it’s also possible to grow an MSP business by working on your service offering and aiming to make more from your existing customer base. Years ago, looking after network infrastructures social media marketing jobs typically involved using a whole host of different tools, including remote access utilities, antivirus consoles and uptime monitoring software. Today, various solutions exist that help you centralize control of multiple infrastructures. Choose the right one, and you can have a bird’s-eye view of all the equipment under your jurisdiction from a central dashboard. But how does this help you grow your MSP business? By freeing up the time you used to spend on all those different tools, leaving you more available for project work and new customers. The ultimate goal of every MSP should be to provide everything customers need to run the IT side of their businesses. If you’ve still got customers using third-party antivirus products or backup solutions, you are missing a revenue opportunity. You should be social media and marketing providing these services yourself as part of the package, or at the very least making some reseller commission. The same applies to every facet of IT provisioning of each of your customers' needs. Many MSPs have gradually moved into managed services from a more traditional service provider model. If this applies to you, chances are you’ve still got some customers stubbornly hanging onto the break/fix model. Try to use real life figures, such as historical invoices, to prove that moving to the MSP model makes financial sense. It may not boost your overall income, but it will boost your guaranteed regular income, which will increase the value of your business.

Look for additional savings in specific solutions and services.

As partnering can help expand services, it can also lead to savings through utility-based pricing models or in having a collaborator to help set up your organization’s infrastructure. With the purchasing power of a Fortune 500 company and flexible financing options, MSPs often leverage Insight’s specific expertise or our supply chain and services arm for the ability to scale. For example, we have a client that needs to deploy infrastructure in six different data centers around the world in the next 60 days. The organization already knows how to do one data center, 30 days at a time. However, social media marketing agency it doesn’t have the wherewithal to scale very rapidly. That expedited timeline is feasible in partnering with us. You can grow rapidly by leveraging Insight’s consumption-based software licensing consulting as opposed to buying VMware® or Microsoft® licenses on a perpetual model. In having access to a subscription-based, utility-based pricing model, you can scale your infrastructure quickly without having to pay for everything outright. That financial model offers the potential to save millions of dollars. Although developing scalable standards won’t happen overnight, you can start forming strategic social media marketing company partnerships today. There’s no rule that says your customers have to be on your infrastructure, and there are many options for where the hosted application or hosted data sits. Partnering with best-in-class or local resources will help you add to your portfolio quickly without having to make a large investment in your organization’s infrastructure. Dozens of MSPs have selected Insight for our strong relationships with 3,500 partners. MSPs have also found benefits in our more than $3 billion in inventory, world-class supply chain, robust e-commerce capabilities, complete IT lifecycle support and deployment management.