The world is changing fast. Businesses of all shapes and sizes feel intense competitive pressure to do more and to be more places. Tools like email, WiFi, online scheduling, and online collaboration are no longer luxuries.
They’re necessities for most companies. If your company is too small to staff up a robust in-house IT department, this presents a problem -- which is typically solved by an MSP or IT consulting firm.
How Managed Services Provider in Denver Help Their Clients
MSPs, short for managed services providers, take care of anything and everything a small business could need on the technology front -- desktop support, mobile devices, Internet access, security, productivity applications, and business continuity just to name a few.
Many Denver managed services providers such as PEAK Resources and Platte River Networks do a very respectable job in this department.
But when you look at some of the smaller managed services providers in the greater metro Denver area, you might wonder if the quest to be the single-point-of-contact is possible with a small team? Is it a good idea for the MSP and their clients? Or are these firms spreading themselves too thin and over-extended?
Partnering for Web Hosting, Data Center Services, and Infrastructure
For MSPs whose clients have a mission-critical website presence, it can make sense to partner up with another provider with deeper expertise in web hosting, colocation data center services, or infrastructure. Why?
To answer this question, we recently sat down with Anthony Francis, support manager of Handy Networks.
Anthony heads up the NOC (network operations center) and help desk team at Handy Networks and brings nearly two decades of experience in supporting managed services.
When asked how Handy Networks partners with Denver managed services providers, Anthony explained how “they lean on us to augment their team. To systems administrate tasks that they don’t have time to do. They (managed services providers in Denver) provide a core set that we don’t. They edit their clients’ site code. They do the application part of it. And we do the systems administration part.”
Deciding On Your Core Competencies to Provide the Best Value and Service to Your Clients
To a non-technical small business owner, it may be difficult to delineate between the kinds of issues that are related to the desktop, cloud services, connectivity, security, uptime, load balancing, clustering, or virtualization. They just want “it” to work.
However, it can be a tall order -- bordering on impossible -- for an MSP with fewer than a few dozen employees to have deep enough expertise in anything and everything IT related that a small business client could throw at them.
While it’s certainly the value proposition and core competency of many MSPs to provide outsourced virtual CIO services -- essentially being the outsourced virtual IT department, in practice, it’s often a combination of in-house salaried staff along with select partnerships required to sustain this kind of model.
“If you don’t want to spend time doing server administration -- updates and installing packages -- troubleshooting -- and you want to focus on the main service that you’re providing to your clients, then that’s where Handy Networks fits in on the managed side,” Anthony recounted.
“We have a clear delineation of where our responsibility ends under managed services and where theirs picks up. Handy Networks is not doing more traditional outsourced IT -- being the outsourced virtual CIO -- we’re not doing that. We’re just doing administration stuff that’s here (in our data centers). And sometimes stuff that’s remote. We have a few remote clients, but we don’t do desktop support.”
Do you think that managed services providers in Denver sometimes over-extend themselves? Or are most MSPs masters at finding and managing the right partnerships to augment their team?