I recently spoke with several managed services vendors, and I asked them this question: “What’s the #1 recurring revenue opportunity that solutions providers miss?” I learned a lot of good information from their answers, but the one answer they all had in common surprised me: BYOD (bring your own device).
Indeed, there is a trend happening right now among your customers where they’re trying to figure out the best way to deal with their employees’ smart phones, tablets, and other consumer devices that are making their way onto their networks. According to the latest research from Gartner, 90% of companies will support corporate applications on personal mobile devices by 2014. If you’ve only been focused on managing your customers’ PCs, servers, and MFPs (multifunction printers), you’re missing a big revenue opportunity.
Where can VARs make their money selling BYOD services? Security is a good place to start. Consider this: Business owners, sales reps, and other employees can potentially generate and save sensitive corporate information on their BlackBerry, iPhone, and Droid device. You can help protect this information by providing RMM (remote monitoring and management) services whereby your mobile customers’ devices are backed up to the cloud when they connect to their corporate networks. Also, if a mobile device is lost or stolen, it can be remotely locked out or wiped clean. This service can be added to your managed services offering, and can be the one thing that separates you from your competitors.
May 7, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Hi Jay,
You are absolutely correct. When we decided to make a big commitment to Mobile Device Management a year ago, I will admit there was a lot of internal debate. A year later with comprehensive integrated MDM features available for all four top platforms we have been truly amazed at the demand.
But what is really significant is that for the first time in MSP history this demand for a managed service is coming directly from end customers to the MSPs rather than requiring complicated demand generation marketing programs.
Customers are looking for security and a successful user experience, while MSPs are looking for RMM features that allow them to provide security, asset management, configuration management and event resolution all from the same dashboard they manage other devices, networks and applications.
At Level Platforms we are right now doubling down on MDM 2.0 to make sure our partners stay ahead of this transformational managed services opportunity.
Peter Sandiford
CEO Level Platforms
May 17, 2012 at 3:04 pm
Peter,
Thanks so much for your feedback and sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. I was at the HTG Peer Group event last week in Dallas and BYOD/mobile device management continues to be a hot topic among the MSPs. I just finished a video blog today (which will go live tomorrow) and talks about another aspect of BYOD that contrasts consumer file sharing and synchronization applications like iCloud and DropBox with enterprise applications such as Syncplicity. If RMM vendors like LPI offer functionality that is similar to — or even complementary to — this type of application, I would love to know more about that. Here is a sneak peak to the video portion of tomorrow’s blog: http://youtu.be/6HF0Uja8Jmo
Regards,
Jay