The onset of cloud computing and the proliferation of mobile devices has radically changed the IT requirements for a smaller business in the past few years. Gone are the days where an entrepreneur needed upfront capital investment to purchase IT infrastructure and business applications before they could open their doors.
The availability of pay-as-you go cloud computing and SaaS applications, consuming only what you need, has afforded many up-and-coming businesses with access to enterprise applications. These apps enable them to manage and grow their business, without upfront costs and IT expertise.
In response to this shift in the SMB market, the majority of value-added resellers (VARs) have also had to re-evaluate their market offerings and how they service the SMB community. As a result, many VARs have looked to offering cloud-based managed services to their customers, taking care of the provisioning, management and maintenance of their customers IT infrastructure and business applications as a service. This permits SMBs to focus on growing their businesses.
Many of Trend Micro’s SMB channel partners are now changing their business model. They are trying to grow their managed services business and increase their recurring revenue streams, while maintaining their traditional VAR business.
While striving to support this combination of traditional and recurring revenue managed services customers, a key pain point for partners is fixed fees and slim margins on cloud services. Reducing transaction costs, increasing average deal sizes, and improving productivity are of utmost importance to the MSP in order to grow their annuity stream and maintain profitability as they shift their business from a P&L to a balance-sheet-based business.
To help support our partners with their transition to the cloud and accommodate the increasing number of hybrid VAR/MSP businesses, Trend Micro offers a comprehensive MSP solution that combines powerful self-provisioning and multi-tenant management tools with a pay-as-you-go licensing model. This gives MSPs the flexibility they need to support their existing customers using annual licenses while building their recurring revenue business.
Learn more about our MSP solution at: http://www.trendmicro.com/msp
