Technology Reseller v39

01732 759725 18 MANAGED SERVICES training and development. Out of the back of the health pandemic, we are seeing a big opportunity for MSPs to educate customers about technology and how to do more with less. TR : How does co-managed IT differ from what MSPs have done before? GJ: The term co-managed has only quite recently been adopted by the MSP community, but the co-managed concept has been around for a considerable length of time. In the past, MSPs typically had an all or nothing approach: it was either come over to us and we will do everything for you – we will become your IT department and take that headache away from you – or we won’t do anything. That was the approach. MSPs that did do what we now call co-managed IT would take a more sideways approach to relationships that could vary considerably depending on each organisation’s requirements. Typically, they would either take on the very high-end projects that organisations, for whatever reason, didn’t have the skills to do in-house or they would take on low-end work, freeing up the internal resource of the customer to devote to more value-add projects. Today, MSPs have more of a hybrid approach, with a big opportunity for consultancy – being that trusted advisor, being able to come in and really x-ray a business in terms of how it uses technology. Is it giving them an edge in the marketplace? Is it giving them a competitive advantage? Or is it holding them back? That’s where MSPs are getting real leverage at the moment. TR : What are some of the applications that are most popular for this co- managed IT approach? GJ: Certainly, the likes of Datto RMM and Datto Autotask PSA. All of our cloud offerings around PSA and RMM are perfectly aligned to the co-managed space. The Datto RMM is very much about managing the endpoint and estates for clients and being able to automate as much as possible for their internal IT departments. Deploying an RMM tool basically gives you virtual engineers that are on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no holidays or calling in sick. It enables MSPs to be proactive in identifying potential faults before they lead to an outage and gives the end user that A changing role for MSPs What are the opportunities in co-managed IT? We ask Greg Jones, Business Development Director, EMEA at Datto transformation and that work from anywhere world we now live in. Some of these organisations are now more profitable and more agile and able to do more with less. We see a huge opportunity in the enterprise space, from 150 seats right up to a couple of thousand seats, where co- managed is an agenda point – essentially, leveraging the MSP community to drive more change, more security and more agility. For MSPs, there are big opportunities not just with businesses that fit their target customer profile, but also with larger organisations that are starting to be more open to working with different vendors, smaller ones as well. Some of the MSPs we deal with are now working with customers that were out of scope or out of reach in the past, sometimes on very niche pieces of work or really complex solutions and sometimes just to take noise away from that business – all the low-end tickets that come in, all the stuff that can be automated. Co-managed IT extends from just outsourcing the helpdesk or outsourcing security or outsourcing a new networking infrastructure project to providing help with Datto recently turned the spotlight on co-managed IT, where MSPs support the in-house IT teams of larger organisations, with the announcement of a new partnership with Bob Coppedge, CEO of Simplex-IT and CoMITs4MSPs. Together, Datto and the co-managed IT expert will develop a range of tools and resources to help Datto partners compete in this growing area, including live web training and workshops; regular co-managed IT webinars; blogs and videos; seminars at Datto events; and partner toolkits. To find out more about the opportunities in co- managed IT, Technology Reseller spoke to Greg Jones, Datto Business Development Director, EMEA. Technology Reseller (TR) : During the pandemic there has been a lot of talk about the role MSPs can play in supporting in-house IT teams. How big is the opportunity in co-managed IT? Greg Jones (GJ): It’s a huge opportunity right now. The health pandemic has really accelerated the adoption of technology within businesses that before were struggling to make the next leap in terms of digital Greg Jones