Managed services providers

Tata starts Web 2.0 business practice

Taking a break from writing a couple of presentations for next week’s distributor Synnex’s Varnex community event to write about an interesting announcement I saw yesterday from Tata Consultancy Services and WorkLight, which bills itself as a Web 2.0 for business specialist.

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Symantec’s Security Operations Center: A look inside

During last week’s Symantec Partner Engage conference, I got to do something only 200 of Symantec’s 17,500 employees can do: access the company’s Security Operations Center (SOC).

The SOC in Alexandria, Va. is one of Symantec’s four centers throughout the world. The others are in England, Australia and India, and together they process 2 billion incidents a day for Symantec’s managed security services customers. Here are some photographs from inside the SOC and some more information about the facility:

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Could hosted services spur tension between distributor and partner?

San Diego — Ingram Micro CEO Greg Spierkel faced a funny question from partners at the VentureTech Network (VTN) conference here Thursday morning: “What do we do that drives you crazy?”

Spierkel’s answer?

“Buying from my competitors.” Continued »

R.I.P., V.A.R.?

If you’re a value-added reseller, I’ve got some bad news for you.

Are you sitting down? You should probably be sitting down for this one.

You ready? OK. Here goes …

You’re dead.

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When you’re merging with another solution provider, it’s the first 90 days that count the most

It’s official, Incentra Solutions CEO Tom Sweeney says the solution provider will pause for a bit of a breather in its whirlwind acquisition spree, which has seen the company buy out at least a half-dozen other VARs over the past three years. Now, we’ll have to see if the company can repeat the extraordinarily high rates of growth it has recorded over the past several years through more organic methods (like its burgeoning managed service practice for midtier companies). Here’s all the companies you now find under the Incentra umbrella:

• Star Solutions (February 2005)
• PWI (March 2005)
• NST (April 2006)
• Tactix (September 2006)
• Helio Solutions (August 2007)
• Sales Strategies (a.k.a. SSI) (September 2007) (No WONDER the CEO wouldn’t return my calls last fall!)

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Google Chrome’s tremendous upside potential

Google Chrome isn’t anything special as a Web browser — at least not yet.

Sure, Chrome is fast and clean-looking. But it really doesn’t have any “Cool! I wish I’d thought of that!” features that dramatically improve the browsing experience. So what’s all the fuss about?

One word: potential. Continued »

Microsoft: We will cut partners in on our hosted infrastructure services

The word wafting around the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is that the company will at last outline partner rebate/commission structure for those partners bringing customers to Microsoft-hosted solutions including the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. BPOS consists of Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange Server and other services for small businesses, introduced last winter. Continued »

Craving managed services stats and best practices? CompTIA wants to help

With most consumers of information technology expected to ratchet up their spending on managed services this year, the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) has started a Web site intended to aid VARs and resellers figuring out whether the business model is right for their own company. Some long-time managed services advocates, like my friend Oli Thordarson from Alvaka Networks, a 25-year industry veteran who made the switch a number of years back, are even blogging there!

The site, FocusOnMSP, will feature news and research about managed services, online forums, a managed services vendor directory and case studies. But the big draw will probably be the CompTIA Managed Services ROI Tool, which is a calculator that MSPs can use in helping make sales presentations. Check it out.

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist and channel communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. You can reach her at hclancy@swotmg.com.

PR-mageddon!

One of the toughest parts of being an IT writer is deciphering the press releases that vendors send out to pitch their latest products, services and partner programs.

Some are well written, informative and easily understandable. But a lot are heavy on what the Wall Street Journal recently labeled “gobbledygook“: buzzwords, run-on sentences and phrases that no human being would ever utter during the course of normal conversation.

These kinds of press releases may be OK for highly technical audiences, but a lot of times they’re confusing for the end users that channel partners deal with every day. In that spirit, here’s a sampling of some of the week’s worst offenders:

EMC
More Than 1000 Customers Select RSA Envision Platform for Business Acceleration, Feb. 12: “Given the modularity and scalability of the RSA enVision solution, the customer base ranges from large global organizations that need to manage security and compliance in complex, global IT environments, to small businesses that value the simple deployment and out-of- the box reporting capabilities.”

Red Hat
JBoss Unveils Technology Futures with New Community Projects, Feb. 14: “These projects offer sophisticated capabilities that enterprises can readily leverage to advance open source middleware into their organizations.”

Kaseya
Kaseya Empowers MSP Customer Success with New Managed Service Resource Program (MSRP), Feb. 12: “Part of the “Marketing Toolkit” element of Kaseya’s emPower Program, a comprehensive set of service offerings and support resources designed to ensure successful implementation of Kaseya’s IT Automation Framework, the company developed the MSRP as a result of its ongoing efforts to “empower” its customers to exceed expectations and effectively transition their business to the managed services model.”

Cisco
Cisco Fuels Commitment to Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in Asia Pacific with Special Solution Bundles, Feb. 12: “The collaborative platform uses Web 2.0 technology to facilitate dynamic interaction between customers and partners. … The system thus provides an efficient method of communicating with customers and employees to help improve service and increase business agility.”

Bell Micro
Bell Micro teams with Hitachi for SMB storage solutions, Feb. 7: “Hitachi’s SMS 100 is an entry-level storage system designed to fulfill the requirements of SMBs with burgeoning data growth and data protection requirements and enterprises with distributed branch offices looking for simple-to-manage storage offerings that are easy to integrate with the Microsoft Windows platform.”

Attention MSPs: There’s a new online tech support site in town. Interested?

The exclusive Demo conference held several times each year is usually replete with great Web concepts and technologies that won’t really be relevant for the channel for at least a year down the road. But, behold, this week’s conference boasts at least one major exception in the form of SupportSpace, an online community that (in theory) brings together VARs, resellers and managed service providers focused on providing online tech support.

Yair Grindlinger, the Israeli transplant who is Redwood City, Calif.-based SupportSpace’s CEO, says his goal with the platform is to support a community of tech-support experts who have been certified and vetted according to a set of criteria defined by the community. Mostly, they’ll help you get the word out about your managed services. Providers get ratings within SupportSpace based on prior customers’ experience. People with a problem can search by criteria such as availability, or whether or not someone is online to help them NOW. They can also pick someone based on expertise, price, cases solved, and so forth.

When I spoke with Grindlinger on Monday afternoon while he was prepping for his Demo demo, he said about 200 experts are currently registered (not bad for a company that launched basically a few days ago as I write this), although there are dozens more going through the process. The one thing I’ll give them a big thumbs-down for is that the site only supports Internet Explorer-based support experiences right now. At least that’s the message I got when I tried to engage and play around on the site a bit. Then again, I use a Macintosh, so people like this don’t usually care about me. Nothing new there.

Still, this is a concept that is likely to gain more traction, given the sad state of affairs at most corporate help desks. According to Grindlinger, you’ll see SupportSpace align itself with product vendors, for which it might wind up being a support tool; or with organizations such as Tech Support Guy. The SupportSpace community also has an open source mindset and will encourage companies with online tech support tools to add their applications to the community for experts to use. And, of course, the company wants you — VARs and resellers — to get involved in providing your own services.

I asked Grindlinger to compare his site to OnForce, the marketplace for IT services that has been the subject of much channel controversy and debate since its launch a few years back . The big difference is that OnForce is used to organize on-site engagements of all types. In fact, Grindlinger sees the two marketplaces as complementary. I agree. Likewise, both will continue to inspire loathing among resellers and VARs who fear the commodization of their high-margin services business. Guess we’ll see how both marketplace models play out.

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist and strategic communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. She can be reached at hclancy@swotmg.com.