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On the last day of 2009 a look back at our successes.

One of the key values that Do IT Smarter brings to our partners is that we allow them to focus more on their business. In our model we provide all of the backend services, NOC, Help Desk, the tools, and more importantly all of the process around this. Our partners provide the strategic account management onsite support, project work and project management. This allows them to focus on their business and the more high value services that they provide to their customers.

This month we have a lot of exciting news. However, I wanted to focus on our announcement to partner with CompuVault for remote online data backup. As many of you that have been with us for a while may already know, this will be our fourth partnership with a remote online data backup company. The first solution turned out to be too client-focused and the company ended up having financial problems. The second product was offered as an add-on to Silverback, and while based on the robust Asigra platform, was too immature for the market. The third solution that we dealt with was Digisense, which had a great product but unfortunately the company's leadership left shortly after we partnered with them and last fall they effectively went out of business.

Do you know who your competitors are? I ask this question of a lot of people that I meet in our industry and am surprised to find that not many of them know the answer. Sure, they may know the name of a competitor or two but they don't really know the details of their competitors' services. This can be very dangerous when competing on a managed services contract. If you are wondering why it is any different now than in the past, let's look at a couple examples:

Last month I made my first of many trips this year to get out and visit our partners in person. I am doing this to better understand our partners' needs, see where they need help from us and see where we need help from them. In speaking with one particular partner we were discussing how to articulate the value of a managed service relationship to a prospective customer. We generally focus our marketing efforts around a message of how proactive support results in decreased downtime, increased productivity and therefore increased profitability. He mentioned that he was having a lot of success with a message focused more on "continuous improvement". That struck a chord for me as this is certainly a foundation of any successful ongoing relationship with your customers; and in fact I was sitting at his office in an effort to continuously improve our services.

I have seen many articles in the past couple of weeks that state that the managed services market is continuing to grow. Much of this is driven by the fact that MSPs can provide services for a customer at a fraction of the cost as compared to handling them in-house.

With so much talk on the economy as of late I think that we all agree that this is a good time to be an MSP. We know that companies can turn to our services to lower their costs of supporting their IT support requirements. I think that the big question that many MSPs are asking is not just "how" do we find these opportunities but once they are found, how do we close them? This is a place where Do IT Smarter can help.

In last month's article I mentioned that the competitive landscape is getting crowded for managed services providers. This month I wanted to take a quick look at why this is the case. The benefits of the MSP model are easy to see - with product margins slipping and spending on IT projects down, a recurring revenue model that still has good margin potential is an obvious choice. But why would customers want to consider managed services?

Running the Help Desk at Do IT Smarter is a thankless job. Rarely do you have someone simply calling to wish you well or checking in to see how the family is doing. People call because they need help... and they need it right now.