Managed Services can Take Away The Pricing Pain

Flexible leasing options have become a way to bridge the gap between the high up-front cost of traditional software and hardware product sales, and the low, monthly cost of paying for managed services, said Jeb Carter, president of DefenderSoft, a Dallas solution provider specializing in security that has recently shifted more toward providing managed e-mail threat protection and other hosted security services.

Fact is, there are some Defender-Soft customers who are still not ready to make the transition to managed services, even though they are aware of the savings an MSP can provide, said Carter. To keep these customers on board—and win new customers who also may not be ready for managed services—DefenderSoft leverages creative leasing terms to keep prices lower than they would be under traditional licensing and purchasing terms, he said.

“It’s two separate parts of my business: the MSP side, and the leasing side,” said Carter. “And you can save by leasing. Say a customer wants to buy $40,000 worth of product that covers them for three years, but they only have $20,000 in this year’s budget. What we do is I finance it and spread it out over a three-year period, and when we set it up for them, it costs them $15,000 a year, so we actually freed up $5,000 in their budget for other things.”

DefenderSoft has gone directly to banks and lending institutions to underwrite customer leasing options, said Carter. Doing so provides more flexibility of terms, he said.