Then layering on top of that are backup and disaster recovery. Everybody’s got to have their data. Everybody should have a data strategy for their business. Many SMB customers simply do not. They’ve got thousands of pieces of information, some of it financially related, that are literally sitting on a server in the back of a room, right?
They don’t have any redundancy or any failover in their business today. Many MSPs are capturing that opportunity, showing up at the SMB’s door and saying, “Hey, I’ve got a scalable, economical backup strategy for you”.
CI: All those things kind of fall into the “IT director protecting themselves” category. You’re protecting your organization’s network. I’m also wondering, what about more add-on type of services? Things like video as a service or software updates as a service and things like that. Are you seeing demand for stuff like that?
DiMarco: We are. For software updates, many MSPs will provide not only patching for security updates but also revisions and applications and version changes as part of what they do today. Then also moving to more cloud applications, like Office 365 as an example, [that give] the end customer an automated way to get the next latest and greatest version without having to upgrade a whole bunch of licenses.
VARs are grabbing that solution and they’re just talking specifically about Office 365 and then layering that onto some of those foundation-level services that we talked about today and moving them from on-premise licenses to four, $12 received as an example. You get the Office productivity suite and you get complete exposure to any new versions as they come about over the next three to four years, however that occurs.
As far as collaboration services, you mentioned video as a service. We’re seeing more growth right now in the hosted voice space. The ability for an SMB end customer to leverage a provider to provide voice access is a huge growth opportunity today.
Again, it’s easy for an MSP to take that as a service and layer it onto the model that they already built today, right? If you provide help desk support, monitoring support, antivirus support, 365 for a user for an extra, I’ll make this up, $30 a month, you get a handset, access to a voice network and then all of the feature sets that go along with hosting voice.
CI: Do IT directors have more a comfort level with the as-a-service model than traditional facilities manager decision-making types?
DiMarco: I think it’s No. 1, from a financial standpoint, they’re moving budgets from cap X to op X. That’s a really big deal. No. 2, to make it more predictable. Rather than having to manage through a bunch of projects and incidents, let’s take that and control it and move it into a predictable monthly bill, right?
Second, the advent of the cloud. Think of a small business that can be 20 developers that do nothing but custom develop and work for the healthcare industry. If you look at that as a small business, they’re actually using very sophisticated technology and they’re leveraging the cloud.
Half their business could be with Amazon, where they’re spinning up servers all week long, all month long to do various application developments and deployments, right? That’s all annuities and consumption base, monthly recurring revenues.
That organization is going to have a totally different view on the world, versus a traditional small manufacturing shop that’s got lots of assets, whether they’re network devices or endpoints as an example. It’s kind of coming at it from two different angles.
I think in the case of video or digital signage, what we’re seeing is the endpoint is not only a computing device that you and I have. It could also be a panel with some type of a computing device attached to it that is now another endpoint on the network.
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That’s where I think there has been a much greater focus on IT directors or even SMB owners to adopt things like digital signage as part of how they go to market, right?
We see that more so in the SMB space. If there’s an MSP who’s calling on an urgent care clinic and there are 50 users inside the organization, some of which are full-time or part-time. Then in the waiting room there are four different panels that display content for that single MSP who is supporting that business as kind of the outsourced IT director. Those three panels are endpoints that sit on a network.
