Opinion: Solution providers must make sure they dig deep enough when considering a managed services practice.As most solution providers struggle with how to transform their companies to deliver higher-margin managed services, most of the executives doing the pondering are contemplating only the size of the iceberg above the waterline, rather than the real size of the obstacle threatening to rip a hole in their business from stem to stern.
Ideally, when navigating fields of icebergs, you would want access to the soundings taken by those who previously navigated the waters so you can match them with the latest shifts in the current. In the case of managed services, a solution provider that has navigated this area before is ClearPointe Technology, a former hardware reseller turned managed services provider that today manages more than 25,000 devices from a network operations center in Little Rock, Ark.
What makes ClearPointe a trailblazer in managed services is that it began its journey in the space back in 2000, right after the general collapse of the technology economy. Before that, it had focused on professional services, to which the company turned in 1995 after determining the hardware reseller market was going to be too difficult a space in which to make a significant profit.
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More by necessity than choice, ClearPointe started its journey by opting to customize the MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) framework to create a managed services platform that today costs about $600,000 to $700,000 a year in engineering to run. But ClearPointe has opted to stay with MOM because providers of managed services platforms, such as Level Platforms Inc., still require a relatively expensive amount of customization, coupled with the double whammy of asking their solution provider customers to share about $10,000 of revenue per managed server with another company on an ongoing basis.
According to ClearPointe CEO Jeff Johnson, the better part of valor is for a solution provider to build the managed services platform itself and then get as many customers as possible to standardize on Hewlett-Packard servers running Remote Insight.
That in itself may not seem like a big deal, but it turns out that owning the managed service is now putting ClearPointe in a strategic position needed to become not only the manager of IT infrastructure for its customers but also the distribution hub through which all CRM (customer relationship management), security and backup software now enters the premises of its customers.
To accomplish that, ClearPointe is partnering with solution providers that have specialties in particular applications that complement its existing services, and ultimately ClearPointe expects to deliver a number of business consulting services as part of a larger SAAS (software as a service) ecosystem that it will control. In fact, that ecosystem already reaches across 38 states to give the one-time regional reseller a firm nationwide footprint.
Furthermore, ClearPointe expects its ongoing engineering expenses to drop substantially once Microsoft completely rolls out Systems Center Essentials, a set of system management tools optimized for distributed environments that should reduce the amount of customization work that ClearPointe has to do.
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Johnson would freely admit that if he and his cohorts had known everything in 2001 that they know now about managed services, whether they would have pursued this course as a company is an open question. But now having done it, they have arrived at the edge of a new world of opportunity they never would have wanted to miss. ´
Michael Vizard is editorial director of Ziff Davis Media’s Enterprise Technology group. He can be reached at michael_vizard@ziffdavis.com.
