MSP Platform Pioneers
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The 2006 market for MSPs so far has been a wild ride that combined innovation with high drama, and there was no shortage of pioneering entrepreneurs wielding influence on the managed services frontier.
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As solution providers flocked toward managed services, two recognized MSP pioneers, Peter Sandiford, CEO of LPI Level Platforms, and Gavin Garbutt, CEO of N-able Technologies, triggered a dramatic and all-out price war between themselves and other popular rivals. As this price war raged on, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of upstart MSP
vendor AdventNet, saw an opening and turned up the volume on an aggressive all-you-can-eat program that lets MSPs run AdventNet's full-blown OpManager in an unlimited number of customer sites for 30 days each.
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Meanwhile, Akash Saraf, CEO of Zenith Infotech, an India-based outsourcer of MSP services, put downward pricing pressure on the entire industry with nearly unbeatable pricing. For fixed fees as low as $6.50 per PC per month, Infotech's Saaz service connected remotely to an integrator's customer site and monitored and managed the environment.
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Few will forget Kaseya CEO Gerald Blackie, who shook up the 2006 MSP market by morphing his company's network automation technology, which ran alongside MSP monitoring platforms, to a rival
monitoring product designed to decommission products from N-able, LPI, BMC Software, Ipswitch and others.
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Another big surprise was the September arrival of The Utility Company, the brainchild of N-able co-founder and former CEO Mark Scott. Scott began offering out-of-the-box MSP franchise operations, complete with back-end office support, corporate identity and an optional Mini Cooper painted with The Utility Company brand.
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Not far behind this out-of-the-box MSP concept came the distributors. In the same week, Ingram Micro announced a deal with LPI and Bell Microproducts with SilverBack Technologies, headed by CEO Daniel Phillips.
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A wave of professional services automation vendors made an aggressive run at the MSP market in 2006. Two of the generals of the industry—Arnie Bellini, CEO of ConnectWise, and Bob Godgart, CEO of Autotask—saw they could be the ying to the MSP platform vendors' yang and began battling for MSP market share.
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The reach of managed services into hardware became popularized in 2006 in part by the visionary efforts of solution providers such as Ramsey Dellinger, president of MSP On Demand, and Michael Drake, chairman and CEO of MasterIT. These two Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) pioneers demonstrated ways for midmarket MSPs to fold the cost of low-margin hardware into the lucrative high-margin world of managed services, borrowing a few tricks from enterprise HaaS underwriter Terry Karageorges of National City Commerce Capital.