RMM Upgrades A Continual Path For Continuum

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With your new Continuum Service Desk offering, are you targeting guys that don't provide any sort of call center solution now, or guys who do it during business hours but want additional help after hours?

George: The answer is all of the above. For people that haven't offered it before, it's a fantastic service that allows them to deepen and further their relationship with end users. For people that are using other vendors for service calls, we show distinct advantages of unifying all aspects of remote monitoring and management under one portal. All the ticketing, alerting, monitoring. Nobody is doing it that comprehensively. We know people provide help desk support, but nobody provides full end-to-end support. We think that will be very exciting for people using somebody just for help desk that's not integrating back [to their own platform]. They're spending lots of time and money transferring things that are not supported into their own PSA or CRM. This is all fully integrated.

For people that don't have an [outsourced] service desk solution, they have to come to the realization that that's a poor use of a skilled, expensive resource [to use an in-house technician].

They'd much rather have that tech doing higher-value work and be out in the field and selling and promoting and dealing with on-premise customer activity. I have a fixed, low-cost comprehensive support to do Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 support and work within my ticketing and CRM system, that's really valuable. That frees me to expand and grow. I can use my technicians in my operation to do more valuable customer touch work while having service desk to answer the phone the way I want to. We can look, sound and feel like them.

Ricketts: If I could add some statistics to this, prior to launch we did a partner survey and asked about the need for an integrated environment. We asked how many provide a service desk now, and 98 percent said they have service desk capability. Of that, 87 percent said they were interested in outsourcing that coverage. The real interesting stat is 43 percent of that 87 percent are interested in [24/7] support, [while another] 31 percent want it for business hours, and the remainder was for after hours.

We also asked what features were critical, nice to have and not needed. For RMM, 57 percent said it was critical, and 63 percent said NOC [support] was critical as part of a service desk. That's our sweet spot. Those [respondents] are looking for an integrated experience.

Those companies offering some service desk, 55 percent are doing it with their internal staff today. Fourteen percent are using an outside vendor, and 28 percent use a combination of internal and outside vendors. They might have some critical clients they handle on their own and for others do third-party support. You look at those numbers, and there's clearly a big opportunity for more MSPs to come to an outside vendor.

NEXT: Continuum Gives Back To Veterans

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