MSP Vendor Silverback Slashes Entry-Level Pricing
Silverback on Monday unveiled a new hosted MSP platform offering, which lowers the cost of its entry-level remote IT monitoring and management product from $75,000 to $2,999, said Jonathan Wolf, vice president of product marketing at Billerica, Mass.-based company.
For $2,999, MSPs can buy Silverback's QuickLaunch hosted product, which provides basic remote monitoring and management for five small- and midsize-business customers, which each have networks of about two servers and a half-dozen or so PCs, according to Wolf.
SilverBack also introduced six other hosted offerings that range in price all the way up to $99,500, Wolf said. The $99,500 product delivers a hosted version of Silverback's full-blown enterprise suite and its BusinessBuilder Plus MSP consulting program. The top-shelf offering actually raises the cost of Silverback's platform at the high end, he said.
Midmarket MSPs should find that a $20,000 investment in the hosted service is all they would need to provide managed services to their customers, Wolf added.
"It isn't that we have lowered our price. We've just lowered the barrier of entry," he said.
Dale Holmgren, president of Granite Pointe Partners, a solution provider and MSP in Plymouth, Minn., said he has saved a bundle with Silverback's price reduction.
Granite Pointe was running an MSP platform from Kaseya when Holmgren decided his company needed security services from Silverback, which he said had a stronger offering in that area. So the solution provider decided to couple Silverback's strength in security with the Kaseya's superior IT process automation engine. Granite Pointe originally expected to spend $75,000 to add the Silverback offering, but the arrival of the vendor's lower-price hosted product ended up saving the solution provider about $40,000, Holmgren said.
Over the past year, many MSPs running platforms from Silverback rival have told CRN that they would have preferred to go with Silverback if its price was lower. For example, David Dadian, CEO of Powersolution.com, a HoHoKus, N.J.-based MSP that uses an MSP platform product from LPI and has test driven some others, praised Silverback's offering but had found it cost-prohibitive.
"It's really the only MSP product I've seen out there that almost does it all," Dadian said.
Silverback has been able to lower its barrier of entry by going the hosted route, but it's still not the least expensive way to add managed services. Using a similar, hosted application approach, N-able Technologies in August lowered its entry-level cost from as much as $10,000 to $70 per customer site license per month.
William Adams Jr., vice president of ACS Services, said the Easton, Mass.-based MSP had trouble getting an MSP platform from N-able to run properly but didn't encounter such problems when testing Silverback's product.
"All we did was hook [Silverback] up, and it was amazing. It was no problem at all," Adams said.