Still a long road to MSP

Kiwi resellers are still struggling to get their head around providing managed services according to a visiting expert who says there is a world of difference between providing contracted service support, and being a managed service provider.

Frank Colletti, N-able’s Ottawa-based director of sales, says while everyone claims they are a managed service provider ‘they are not’. “And as a result the message to SMBs has been diluted.”

Colletti says even among N-able’s New Zealand partners, only about 25% ‘have completely nailed’ the MSP model and are offering fixed-fee managed services. “The rest have not shifted fully. They’re selling a defined checklist, bound by time, where anything outside of that is billed separately.

“Managed services are all inclusive to maintain and manage the environment, unless you maybe do an upgrade, or move offices,” Colletti says.

Colletti was in New Zealand last month for N-able’s MSP Roadshow — the first of three planned for New Zealand this year, aiming to help service providers targeting the SMB market to develop and grow a managed service business.

The company recently launched its N-central 9.0 standards-based remote management and monitoring MSP service automation platform, which Colletti says enables partners to automate their service delivery, lower delivery costs and take their business to the next level.

The offering includes Automation Manager, a drag-and-drop MSP automation studio which automates best practices in N-able’s MSP Technician Runbook, providing hundreds of pre-written, pre-tested, ready-to-use automation objects and policies covering tasks across IT maintenance, remediation and diagnostics.

Colletti says partners are also still struggling with the cloud premise. “But it’s a case of what is old is new again — hosted solutions have been around for a very long time. It’s both an opportunity and a threat.

Partners who understand what they can deliver, educate their customers and help them make the transition will be there at the front line when [customers] make the change, and will benefit.”