2006 VARs of the Year

At the peak of the Internet boom in 1999, Do IT Smarter reached a crossroads. Business was humming along, but growth for the small San Diego-based VAR would require significant investment, just as the market was facing a downturn.

Rather than simply stay the course, Do IT Smarter chose an entirely different path--the company gave up serving end users in favor of becoming a managed-service provider serving other VARs. For its efforts, Do IT Smarter was the judges' choice for Business Ingenuity in this year's VARBusiness VARs of the Year Awards.

In 2000, the company was delivering break-fix and other solutions using a managed-service approach--in other words, charging customers monthly fees to run their IT shops. Most were small businesses with fewer than 200 seats. The inflection point came in 2003 when it was apparent that Do IT Smarter couldn't serve all its customers' needs and grow at the same time, says Do IT Smarter president Donn Begg.

"As our existing customers grew, we couldn't help but get pulled into areas where we didn't have coverage," Begg says. "So we started enlisting partners...That's when we decided to franchise our operation, for lack of a better term, and created the Instant MSP program."

It took about two years to take all of its processes, procedures and knowledge and deliver it so a VAR could offer the model to its own customers. The pitch to VARs: Instant MSP would be their back-end infrastructure, including remote systems monitoring, on-site administration, help desk and remote-backup-and-recovery services.

The company has since invested $500,000 to build the Instant-MSP infrastructure with remote-monitoring, e-mail security, remote backup and operational systems.

Partners can offer these services at a fee starting at $199 for five licenses. "We sit behind the scenes and provide greater capability," Begg says, stressing that the solution provider owns the client relationship.

The infrastructure lets a VAR with little IT background jump in. For instance, Delta Communication, a telecom systems reseller, has added IT service delivery to its portfolio, allowing it to offer existing customers new services.

"We can now get to market to two different prospects and use each of the services as a foot in the door," says David Rosenberg, Delta president.

--Jeffrey Schwartz

NEXT: VAR of the Year for Solution Innovation