Survive and Recover: Why You Need to Expand Your Offering

The numbers are in: consumers are saving more than they're spending, and that spells trouble for businesses. This means the recovery will likely to be slow because businesses will continue to be cautious on IT spending due to consumer cut backs.

Unlike the March period, when no customer segment was spared, SMB and public sectors improved somewhat while large accounts continued to deteriorate,

according to the latest report from Raymond James.

However, instead of focusing on the bad news, service provider should take into consideration that small businesses will continue to embrace the hosted service model, or the "cloud." The days of large capital expenses (CAPEX) are gone and the new way of doing business is the monthly pay-as-you-go (OPEX) SaaS model.

If you're a VAR or a MSP, ask yourself this: How are you staying competitive with enhanced services or new product offerings? What are you doing to lower the cost of your customers' IT costs?

Contact us if you're interested to learn more about our Total Outsource Solution or our private label hosted services will help you expand your offering.

One in Five Enterprise to use Hosted Email in 3 Years

According Gartner, surge in hosted email will likely to represent 20% of the commercial email market by 2012 even though it was only at 1% in 2007.

The report stated that:
"Gartner's E-Mail SaaS Threatens Third-Party Vendors report warned that traditional third-party product vendors will suffer in four key areas.

Applications core to the running of on-premise email, such as disaster recovery, and spam and virus filtering tools, will be significantly affected by the move to SaaS email solutions, as will applications that extend the email platform, such as encryption and archiving.

Client-side applications, meanwhile, may not be affected initially, but are likely to decline as the prevalent storage model moves from client to server side, and users access emails via a browser rather than a client."

We have been helping partners to deliver IT smarter with a wide range of products in our hosted model starting with hosted Exchange, SharePoint (collaboration), archiving & compliance and wireless email.

Simply put, on-premise is not looking good as the cloud (hosted) model gains adoption and accelerates in this economy.

ASCII Success Summit - Los Angeles 2009

Last week I attended the ASCII Success Summit in Los Angeles.

There were about 100 VARs who attended the show. I didn't get to see all the presentations as they divided the group in half in order to fit in all the presentations that day. In the future ASCII should either let members determine which presentation they want to attend or allow speakers to talk to all attending members.

The two best presentations at the event were Kent Erickson (ASCII member) from Pointivity and Ron Gavlick from Zenith Infotech.

Kent Erickson's presentation focused on the shift in the IT industry from traditional hardware sales and break/fix services to hosted services and cloud computing.

To view Kent's presentation online, click here:
http://www.slideshare.net/secret/EKSs1rVyDP1xYb

Ron's presentation focused on Zenith's Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) device and the advantages of the BDR over traditional backup systems.

Other speakers at the ASCII Success Summit included:

• Evolve Partners on Microsoft BPOS
• ASCII Member, John Endter for Microsoft Response Point
• ASCII Member, Dave Seibert for StorageCraft
• ASCII Member, David Lawrence for Efolder
• Autotask
• Storage Guardian
• Matt Makowicz – Managed Services Books
• ARRC – HaaS Strategy
• Reflexion

In talking with the attendees and ASCII members you can still see there's a big divide and difference in the IT market between traditional VARs (break/fix) and the MSP industry. Many of the smaller VARs are just getting into MSP or only entered into the MSP market with the last 6 months. Even fewer VARs are offering hosted services, they are still providing on-premise solutions with large hardware capital expenses which involve labor intensive support and ongoing maintenaince.

I had great conversations with many of the VARs about the value of adding hosted solutions as another sales tool. A handful mentioned they are reselling Google Apps and Google Email to their customers, but when questioned about revenue all them said they are not making any revenue off the sale of Google Apps/Gmail but provided the service to the customer to maintain the relationship and desktop support and desktop sales. The same goes for SalesForce.com and other online applications. The traditional VAR is being squeezed out of the market and companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are providing cloud based hosting services direct to customers with little or no revenue opportunities to the VARs.

It will be interesting to see how VARs move forward and what solutions they adopt, especially cloud or hosted solutions over the next year.

Margins + Branding + Process Automation = Pointivity's Partner Program

Over the past few weeks I wrote about the changes in the industry and the shifts in perception from IT consultants, vendors to solutions providers. It is easy to see why we've designed the partner program to focus on developing the the weaker areas for VARs: branding, margins, process automation, and product offerings. Here is the value proposition for our program:


Leveraging Pointivity's superior private label hosted services (with storefront!) allows VARs to offer a wide range of products without having to pay for hardware, software, licensing and maintenance.

One of the fastest way to start is to expand your offering to your customers providing a complete set of services such as hosted Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Dynamics, and wireless emails to earn additional business process outsourcing revenue.

Majority of the businesses needs emails and offering enterprise email solutions such Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry services creates added value from a cost saving(CapEx to OpEx) and infrastructure management perspective(overhead and risks). If you are able to offer the basic IT needs to your customer, it will create future opportunities for additional services while lifting you towards the trusted advisor role. We're working on additional services such as email archiving or efax to complete the email offering.

Our program includes “on-demand” provisioning automation, ecommerce engine (online store), integrated billing (payment gateway options), and feature-rich control panel for administration and private label control panel for end-users.

Your own private label online store allows your customers to sign up (self-service checkout) then the system automatically provisions and deploy the services immediately. It is all about streamlining your business process while providing a branded solution. As the store grows we will be adding more business essential applications such as accounting, CRM or even dedicated servers to strengthen your hosted services offering.

In addition, the solutions is being offered on a wholesale pay-as-you-sell basis allowing your own pricing structure to adjust to the way you sell. You can sell them in packages or include it in your other solutions such as managed services, backup/disaster recovery or even application hosting depending on how you bundle and deliver them.

The more hosted services you offer the higher chance of customer retention because you’re able to provide a wider range of products while aligning both you and your customer’s overhead to revenue via SaaS. Creating value for your customers is the key for high customer retention and it can be done easily with our partner program.