The Monitoring Master Move

This week marks the second master agency that has decided to get into monitoring. It seems like a bold move to go from back office sales support to resemble a NOC (network operations center).

In the case of Telarus, they bought the company and are pushing it out to their partners. Telarus has some IT skills in the software space – building and running GeoQuote.

In the case of Sandler Partners, they are white-labeling ZeroOutages.

It is interesting to me that masters have been chasing the VARs for the last five years, pretty aggressively – and now choose to compete with them.

VARs have been offering RMM (remote monitoring and management of PCs and servers, switches, firewalls and other devices) for years. The big names in RMM – Kaseya, Level Platforms and N-able – have all been acquired by companies that realize an integrated approach to managed IT services is needed. SolarWinds (which bought N-able) offers a platform to automate this for VARs.

Carriers offered managed routers, which provide passive, automated monitoring of the circuit. (Also, passive, automated ticketing with this service. I won’t rant about it today.) It is an inexpensive upgrade that provides the router (CPE) for the customer.

If you are chasing VARs and now offer a service that they offer – one probably integrated into the system that they use for running their business – you might find that the VAR goes elsewhere. In the hyper-competitive marketplace we exist in, everyone is trying to resemble an MSP.

Master Agencies are struggling to figure out what the sub-agents want from them. (I don’t know why they don’t ask instead of guess.)

Some masters are going direct with call centers and national sales teams to drive revenue with higher margin (and to help alleviate the pressure of humongous quota.) Some are adding monitoring. It’s fluid right now. Be interesting to see what shakes out.

Interesting to see how the monitoring affects circuit sales and managed services sales of the carriers – and how that ripples into a struggle at quota – and a scuffle with the carrier becoming a dumber pipe, something they are fighting, kicking and screaming.

Resources:

Good explanation between PSA and RMM tools.

A list of free network monitoring tools from GFI.

Tags: managed it, managed services, master agency, msp, RMM, var, VAR
Related tags: managed services, passive automated, monitoring, sales, interesting, master