Managed Services and the Cisco Channel

Well you can’t swing your arm nowadays without hitting news coverage about somebody’s managed services strategy. And Cisco is definitely among the companies making moves in this area. But if you’re a channel partner looking at a possible MSP model, there are a host of questions to consider: Do you invest in your own infrastructure or do you extend your reselling roots to managed services? There are a lot of different packages here, and some of them offer more branding autonomy than others. Pursuing this agency route clearly hitches your wagon to the success and reliability, but it also provides more options for a wider range of services, given that the investment is typically a lot lower. Running the services in-house gives you a better opportunity to control your own fate, and usually attracts greater focus from the sales force, but the cost of entry can also be significant. So a full-on evaluation of your business plan will be necessary. What is the preferred balance between conventional reselling and managed services? How do you intend to market those services? Who is your target market? What should the financial investment look like? While all of these questions are obviously important, perhaps the most critical one involves your target market. Without an accurate assessment of their needs and willingness to engage a managed services option, the other questions become pretty much of a moot point. Some of the managed services outsourcers require reports on exactly these sorts of issues to assure that potential agents are taking an appropriately methodical approach to building a strategy. Having done that initial homework, much of the process involves examining the home grown option in comparison to the outsourced opportunities that are available for the choosing. At this point, you may also want to look into some of the trade groups from your preferred verticals and start to build a more comprehensive prospect list. This is clearly a very top-of-mind approach to all of this. So I would like to make a special invitation to VARs/resellers who have adopted the MSP model. Tell us what you found to be the most challenging thing about the strategy migration. Was there anything in particular that became a bigger issue than was anticipated? How did your staff manage the transition? Did your customers adapt to it well? Did it end up leading you to a whole new category of customer, and did it affect the loyalty of your legacy customers? How did it go?