Author: Howard M. Cohen
How do your customers see you?
It’s a far more important question than some might think. How your customers see you and the relationship they have with you determines their expectations of you, which can dramatically increase their customer lifetime value (CLV) and the opportunities you can earn from them.
If I Had a Hammer
Craftspeople like carpenters are evaluated based on their ability to build sturdy, reliable structures and furnishings.
How many people consider the hammers, saws, screwdrivers, or other tools the carpenter uses? Even further, how many expect the carpenter to have created their own tools?
Apply that thinking to your own role as a managed services provider. How do your customers evaluate you? How do they measure your quality to determine if they want to continue engaging you or move on to your competition. Do they consider the tools you use, or the results you achieve with them? Do they review the construction of the management platforms you use to manage their Azure environment?
Of course not.
Customers gauge your success based on their own ability to successfully continue using their Azure system. They measure you by your service level agreement (SLA) which is a metric based on how much of the time Azure is available to them. There is no consideration regarding how you kept the cloud services available. Simply the fact that it remains available.
Even if the connection to Azure goes down, your customers are still not going to look at your tools. They will always blame you.
It’s Not About the Tools, As Long as They Work!
It’s been said, “Results Speak Louder.” But when it comes to keeping a customer’s business in business, the ONLY thing that speaks are the results. Azure remains up, available, and fully functional. That’s the key metric.
As an MSP, you need to make sure your tools, the software platforms you use to manage your customers’ Azure environments, must work well.
Does that mean you need to build them yourself? Do you even need to own them?
Your MSP business is best served when you don’t own the software. As cloud computing evolves and the things you need your software to do changes you need that software to change right along with them. You really don’t want to have to update, upgrade, lift and shift, or rip and replace anything when technology changes so rapidly. When you find a platform that works well that you can depend upon to help you manage and secure your customers’ Azure environments, you are best served to obtain it via software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivered from the cloud. Then all the updates and upgrades are performed for you by the SaaS provider. To remain your preferred provider, they will do their utmost to stay current with the latest improvements in cloud management technology, which keeps you ahead of the curve.
Economies of Scale: The Extreme Value of Partnering
How much would it cost you to implement your own cloud operations management platform? Your own data, cloud, and identity security system? How about application incident management, configuration management, patch management, or business continuity and disaster recovery?
Each would cost from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you need to add the cost of operating these platforms on-premises. Powering them. Cooling them. Administration and maintenance of them? These are all the expenses that form the driving value proposition of SaaS. You only pay part of what it costs to operate the systems. Incredible economy of scale.
So, what does it say to your customer that you’re using a platform for all these services that you don’t operate yourself?
Absolutely nothing.
Your customer doesn’t think about the platform or the tools you use. As we said at the outset, their only concern is the result. That result is constant availability and performance. Doesn’t matter to them what you use to achieve it, so long as you achieve it.
And the right management and security services provider becomes a valuable partner in helping you deliver constantly excellent service. Eliminate the long wait for major cloud provider support teams when you depend upon a partner who recognizes and appreciates your role as their partner.
Begin Your Search Here
All the services described in the previous section are delivered to you and your customers by Idenxt. Designed, architected, and built by Azure experts with decades of experience, Idenxt provides all the alerts, reports, and other information you need to deliver the results your customers demand.
Idenxt only delivers these services to customers through Microsoft Partners like you. Our entire team rose through the Microsoft Partner EcoSystem and fully understand what it is to be a vital member of that community. You will find excellent tools, excellent information, and an extraordinary partnership when you partner with Idenxt.
For more information about putting Idenxt to work for you and your customers, contact us here.