Managed Services is only a single component within a comprehensive and well-rounded Annuity-based IT Service Delivery Model. There are 3 services you should be offering your clients in order to give them the most value for their dollar:
Network Monitoring
There are numerous monitoring tools and services from many companies, and all share some commonality – from the ability to monitor basic events to the ability to customize and even trigger Alerts.
Network monitoring tools are used for the purpose of alerting of problems that can affect the normal operation of a critical device or service. For instance, wouldn’t you like to know when CPU utilization is high on a SQL Server, and for how long? How about receiving an Alert when Disk Space has dropped below a specific threshold? Or when a Backup Job has failed? Or if the Exchange Information
Store Service has stopped? Or if a VPN connection has dropped? Or a Website or Web Server is down?
These alerts can impact a Client's uptime if they are dealt with in a timely manner when they are received. Effective network monitoring tools can keep track of just about every Windows (and even some other Operating Systems') events generated, along with network hardware events, 3rd party software events and virus alerts.
The primary benefit of network monitoring tools is that they work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.
Remote Help Desk
With a well-trained staff and a solid SLA and Escalation Process, your Help Desk is your company’s best representation of value to your Clients. If your Help Desk is inefficient, your Clients will
suffer, and you will lose them. If your Help Desk is World- Class, your Clients will continue to utilize your Services, and will be happy to refer you more business, be open to more Solutions, or participate in Testimonials – or all three.
Thanks to the ability to provide support from a remote location, it's possible to give unlimited remote support to your clients between business hours, included in their Managed Services monthly fee. It helps client's budget their IT costs for the entire year, knowing there will rarely be a need for an additional help desk support fee. If the client chooses to pay more, you can offer remote service after hours.
You may be wondering how it's possible to profit if you're providing unlimited support. The reason it works out is because you only need to go onsite when there is a physical Hardware failure, or some extraordinary reason. If you are properly maintaining the client's server, using network monitoring to proactively monitor the status, you are not as likely to see a failure that requires a complete recovery and onsite visit.
Vendor Management
In this value-added service, you actually manage all of the client's infrastructure vendors for them:
Why would you want to take on this extra headache? Chances are, you're already supporting your client's vendor relationships anyway and not getting paid for it – you may as well include this as a service so everyone benefits. You probably get calls from your client's vendors when they're onsite, asking for help or passwords to install new equipment you weren't prepared to deal with; or your client calls because they were working with one of the vendors and messed something up during an upgrade; or a frantic cry for help from your client who is trying to install equipment from the vendor that they don't need – and the list goes on.
You are already managing your client's vendors in a reactive (and inefficient) way; using a vendor management system you can manage them proactively (and much more efficiently).
Erick Simpson
MSP University
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