Meeting SMB IT Priorities

As more economic signs point to the bottoming of this recession, companies are starting to reposition themselves by aligning IT strategy with business goals. According to the latest survey by Forrester Research, top priorities for small and midmarket businesses are "improving IT efficiency and streamlining business processes. 15% say that this is a critical priority while 45% of SMBs say they are working on initiatives around this."

The key take away is that IT strategy is now business strategy. Smart companies are serious about leverage IT to improve all facets of operations. It's about doing more with less by investing in IT to reduce costs and improve performance. Looking ahead, IT solution providers, VARs and MSPs will need to transition into more of a strategic role that focuses on solving business problems instead of technology challenges.

Here are some highlights from the survey:

• Top goals within IT organizations are improving end-user work force productivity, managing customer relationships, and acquiring and retaining customers.
• Hardware spending, led by server and networking equipment is facing more cuts than software spending.
• Software spending is being led by security technologies – 25% of SMBs say they plan to increase spending here while 29% say they plan to decrease it.

Pointivity Ranked Amongst the Top 100 World’s Most Progressive MSPs by MSPmentor

Thanks to Joe for the great webcast on The MSPmentor 100 (2008-2009 edition).

MSPmentor 100 list rankings are un-sponsored and based purely on research by examining the world’s most progressive managed service providers.

This year Pointivity was ranked at #20 in revenue, #25 in devices managed and #53 in overall ranking.

Instead of ranking MSPs merely by total revenue, MSPmentor calculates an index measurement using such metrics as overall managed services revenue, overall managed services revenue growth, percentage managed services revenue growth, managed services revenue per employee, number of devices managed, and other data points comparing fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2007. This index approach ensures small, midsize and large MSPs from around the world are recognized on the MSPmentor 100.

Tightened budgets making SaaS attractive

Today we honor the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and tomorrow we have President Obama moving from the on deck circle to the home plate. However; we couldn't stop more bad news from the banks. Royal Bank of Scotland bites the dust on a massive 28 billion pounds ($41.3 billion) loss, which would be the biggest loss ever reported by a British company, ouch!

So if banks don't and won't lend, business that used to depend on it will have to employ operation cash preservation - CapEx to OpEx mode. While enterprise software vendors are pushing for SaaS contracts, it can benefit the small-mid size VARs, MSPs, and solution providers.

By doing the math correctly on licensing, services and hosting; solution providers can market a value package that makes their customer feel like they're receiving huge discounts. And because of current economic conditions, more businesses are willing to give SaaS a try, employing pilot programs to seek proof of concepts. Pre-sale SaaS trials are good for traditional customers that had no experience with SaaS and if the user experience is great and the price is right why wouldn't they continue?

This is why we developed our partner program around SaaS enablement for partners, reducing hardware and software risks to the minimal while allowing the focus to shift towards business, marketing (brand) and sales. We can't control the shift in technology but we can implement control in our business and that's where the focus should be to deliver IT smarter.

2009 MSP Watch

An interesting article from MSPmentor with regards to Dell aggressively pushing their managed services.

Joe made some excellent points on the fact that Dell is focused on the mid-market while small MSPs gets the SMB space. There is also the argument that MSPs will do a better job servicing their clients vs big guys like Dell which allows a separation in market share.

It will be interesting to see what MSPs will do once Dell gains more ground as momentum shifts to À la carte service at very competitive prices. Hardware and software will continue its commoditizing path to serve the SaaS model, aggressive direct sales will be the focus as time passes. You can't piss off everyone in one go, but you can break them down so only the strong survives.

Another New Site launched by Microsoft on S + S

Derek pointed out to me today that Microsoft launched another new site - Software + Services yesterday. I like that video on the homepage showing how the "Microsoft Cloud Server Provisioning" works and my favor part is the dude receives a message on his TV screen about his server while he is in the middle of his Xbox game! He then walks up to the TV and touch-screens his way to view his cloud provisioning progress.


Clearly Microsoft is ready for the S+S assault 2.0, it'll be interesting to see how ISVs and MSPs respond.