When I read industry reports that mention that there are hundreds and thousands of Managed Service Providers in US alone, I often say to myself – Man! Something is wrong with these reports. From a bird’s eye view, all Microsoft channel partners are MSPs. But you all know the truth, they are not. The actual number of ‘Real MSPs’ in the market is considerably low and often these real MSPs are confused with break fix VARs and Hardware Resellers. When the consolidations, M&A’s are happening in the real MSP segment, there seems to be a trend where these traditional hardware resellers and break fix VARs are interested and trying to adopt Managed Services model. That’s what we witnessed at the ASCII summit that happened in Dana Point, CA.
These VARs are showing tremendous interest in learning the Managed Services model and their key focus for 2013 is to create a ‘Monthly Recurring Revenue’ which of course – profitable and grow on top of that. So as you can clearly see, there is a consolidation happening on the MSP front and ‘new MSPs’ are emerging from the existing VAR market. What this means for us? Good question. For a channel vendor like Vembu, we are of course excited to see new channel partners emerging to sell in the SMB segment, but ‘new’ here means there is a huge education front involved. From our perspective the market needs to be constantly educated on why ‘Managed Services’ is best suited for Small Business segment and not to fall for the commoditized cloud solutions which might lure these resellers promising good profit margins. Our on-premise and cloud solutions (both Backup, File Sharing & Synchronization) are designed from ground up to fit the Managed Services model and priced right for the small business segment. So the new resellers we met at ASCII summit are tremendously interested in trying our solution and get a head start in starting to offer true Managed Backup Service to their customers. Either way, we had a nice time meeting these resellers and our channel partners and hoping to return to ASCII summit soon.
We also enacted a small skit on stage at ASCII summit during the ‘profit pitch session’. The session talks about how the current VAR / SMB market is currently poised with consumer grade solutions that won’t work for the business market like Tape Backup, Consumer grade online backup, USB backup etc… And how Vembu solves that problem with its one stop backup & disaster recovery solution for the business market and also increases profit margins for MSPs and Resellers. You can watch the same below.
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