CompTIA Breaking Barriers with CompTIA's Managed Services Community

Learn about the power of network management for MSPs and why it’s important to “keep the beer cold” for your clients in this episode of Breaking Barriers from CompTIA’s Managed Services Community.

Community Chair Charles Love talks with Auvik’s Alex Hoff about ways to build a scalable managed service practice, networking for MSPs and ways MSPs can find revenue beyond desktop and computer managed services. Listen in as they talk about ways to use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to create triggers, alerts and automated responses, and how emerging technologies like the Internet of Things are going to have a big impact on MSPs.

Special note to subscribers: Reach out to host Charles Love on Twitter @charlesjlove with the hashtag #podcast to tell us what you’d like to hear on future episodes of Breaking Barriers from CompTIA’s Managed Services Community.

The average ransomware attack costs $4,300 dollars and companies pay 10 times that much in downtime, says Datto’s Rob Rae in this episode of Breaking Barriers. He sits down with Cisco’s Amy Hodge, who is vice chair of the Managed Services Community, to talk about Datto’s 2018 State of the Channel Ransomware Report.

“The ransomware report is a tool MSPs can use to lead into a security discussion,” Hodge said. MSPs can also repackage information from the report it and use the paper to get end users interested in their managed services. The ransomware report includes data for UK, Canada, Australia and U.S. markets, and is in its third publication.

This episode also includes tips on how to sell customers on ransomware solutions without playing on fear, and how to stay on top of GDPR as the standards change across the globe. “Let’s get everything in line so when the laws do change, you don’t have to worry about it,” Rae said.

Download the State of the Channel Ransomware Report from the resource library at datto.com. “You can use it as an asset to get your end users interested in your managed services,” Rae said.

Datto 2018 State Of The Channel RansomwareReport

Recorded Webinar-Datto's Ransomware Report with Rob Rae

You must understand the breakdown of your costs, services and delivery so that you know how much to charge people, says Vince Tinnirello of Anchor Network Solutions in this episode of Breaking Barriers. It’s one of many tips he offers during this talk with Managed Services Community leader Lisa Person. During the episode, they discuss two core concepts: What does it cost me to deliver service by the hour and how do I price my service offering to clients?

“You have to know your expenses and your revenue in order to understand the health of your business,” Tinnirello says. They talk about overall costs and also get into specifics, like whether long term technology planning counts as a service as much as antivirus. “If you really want to measure your true costs, you have to include all of them.”

Listen for tips on how to calculate your hourly cost of delivery, decide how much you can charge your clients and factor in curveballs, like client neediness and aging infrastructure. Stay tuned to the end for a deep dive into P&L and ways to stretch your margins.

Resources referenced in the podcast

HCSD Calculator https://www.comptia.org/communities/resources/hourly-cost-of-service-delivery-calculator

Service Plan Pricing https://www.comptia.org/communities/resources/service-plan-pricing-calculator

A sample chart of accounts page 6 of Quick Start Guide to Managed IT Service pdf.  https://www.comptia.org/resources/comptia-quick-start-guide-to-managed-it-service

How do you know what you’re getting and how do you know what you’re paying for? In this episode of Breaking Barriers, managed services experts Charles Love and Joshua Smith talk about how to identify invoice oversights and get the most out of your vendor invoices.

“How do we get what we’re paying for and ensure we’re leveraging it properly?” Smith said. From both the vendor and the MSP angles, Love and Smith talk about how to avoid overpaying, cancel options you’re not using and ways to stop leaving money on the table.

They use partnerships as an illustration of unused benefits: Your partners probably offer shipping or travel discounts that you’re not taking advantage of, or deal registrations that would save you money. CompTIA’s Premier Membership, for example, includes discounts on shipping, rental cars and insurance — stuff companies use every day.

Listen to the episode and learn how to turn the magnifying glass back on yourself to identify invoice oversights. Stay tuned for tips on ways you can leverage automation to set reminders and save even more.

In this episode of Breaking Barriers, Martin Tracey talks with CompTIA’s Managed Services Community manager Lisa Person about offering unified communications as a service (UCAAS).

As a master solution provider in the premise and UCASS space, the CEO of LANtelligence offers his insight on how to get into unified communications as a service, and shares the findings of a research study that looks into how providers of the software go to market, what’s changed over the last 10 years and how direct sales have upended the industry.

“We’ve seen a lot of change in the industry, so the research study was to see the trends and what’s really happening from people who are working directly in it,” Tracey said.

They also discuss the difference between the American and the Canadian markets, including the prevalence of private label cloud solutions, and how gaps in the market relate to the amount of solutions available. Listen to learn what a master agent’s role is and what kind of value they bring to the table and stay tuned to hear Tracey’s opinion on why now is the right time to get into UCAAS.

https://www.research.net/r/2018UCaaSMSP

If you are an MSP who is currently selling UCaaS solutions or thinking of selling Cloud-Based Unified Communications LANtelligence needs your input. Please participate in the second annual channel survey to help us identify main challenges and pain points that MSPs face. The results of the survey will help MSPs compete and win in the UCaaS market as the channel continues to evolve.

Blockchain is powerful because there’s no centralized infrastructure that controls it. Community Manager Lisa Person talks with technology writer and senior editor at Fixate IO Christopher Tozzi about the power of blockchain and how MSPs can get into the game. In this episode of Breaking Barriers, a podcast from CompTIA’s Managed Services Community, the two talk about how to use smart contracts to regulate blockchain, how to write SLAs to be sure you get paid for your work and whether 5G will solve any of these problems.

“To use it successfully you need to think about what could go wrong and how to manage those problems,” Tozzi said.

Early adoption hype cycle, MSPs that want to get involved in blockchain need to get serious about familiarizing themselves with software that runs on the blockchain and the new challenges they haven’t thought about.

“Folks are much more excited about the political and economic potential of blockchain technology and there’s been less discussion on the technical side of things and how you actually deploy blockchain technology in an everyday setting,” Tozzi said.

Stay tuned to the end for his advice to MSPs. “A lot of these problems you can’t solve on the fly, they’re problems you’re going to want to spend time thinking about,” he said.

For more on blockchain, read CompTIA’s Practical Guide for the Public Sector: Harnessing the Blockchain Revolution. 

According to CompTIA’s new State of the Industry report, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the most popular of the emerging technologies, and the one most MSPs have a familiarity with. In this episode of “Breaking Barriers with the Managed Services Community,” community leader Lisa Person talks with David Schwartz, author of the white paper “What to Look for in an IoT Managed Services Provider.”

The host and guest talk about how to the Internet of Things to create efficiencies for your clients and save them money overall. They also discuss the pros and cons of building and partnering to solve IoT security issues.

“There’s no ‘expert in the field’ that’s at any business because so few individuals at any business have really done this,” Schwartz said. An MSP with deployment experience can guide new clients through IoT solutions and help grow the products they provide.

“Ultimately, we want people to do what they were trained to do and not get pulled away from their skill set by getting bogged down these random tasks that IoT really can supplement and take over for them,” Schwartz said.

His company uses IoT to monitor corporate-provided mobile devices and identify cost-cutting methods, and creates reports for those enterprises so they can drill down and enforce a mobile policy.

“As an MSP, you’re always doing consulting to some extent, and this allowed us to become a stronger resource to our customers,” he said. “They’re dealing with something that’s so new to them. It’s the wild wild west.”

The Breaking Barriers podcast, from CompTIA’s Managed Services community, features experts in the MSP space and interviews with members of the CompTIA Managed Services community. You can download the white paper from the Managed Services Community resources at www.comptia.org/ and subscribe to this and all podcasts from CompTIA Communities on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.