MSP 501 Profile: Collabrance Stresses Cybersecurity

Company Name:  Collabrance
Company MSP 501 Rank: 222
VP/GM: Corey Kerns
Headquartered: Cedar Rapids, IA

Primary Services:

Outsourced Live-Answer Help Desk & NOC in Iowa

Private-label offerings for Solution Providers:

Value-add services examples:

Twitter: @Collabrance

It’s no secret that cybersecurity is top of mind and dominates most provider conversations. With cyberattacks continuing to plague MSPs and end users alike, taking measures to ensure that your customers and their data are properly protected is imperative.

GreatAmerica IT company Collabrance has sought to tackle this issue by introducing a newly enhanced managed security service provider offering for IT solution providers to resell to SMB end-user customers. The solution is designed to help other solution providers use this private-label cybersecurity offering to differentiate, capture more opportunity and better help protect their customers’ data and information.

Collabrance’s Corey Kerns

Corey Kerns, vice president and general manager of Collabrance, stresses the importance of the solution in the face of these ever-growing cyber threats.

“Our IT teams are continuously evaluating and vetting solutions, managing vendors and updating our technology road map to stay ahead of the curve,” explained Kerns. “Our new Collabrance MSSP Offering is built to enable our partners to differentiate in their local market place, capture more opportunity and provide effective technology their SMB customers’ need.”

Here, with cybersecurity at the helm, Kerns talks about what he sees as the biggest growth areas in the next one to two years, the biggest technology or business decisions that have driven Collabrance’s growth and how the company has differentiated itself from other MSPs.

Channel Futures: Where do you see your biggest growth areas in the next 12-24 months?

Corey Kerns: Advanced security will become one of the biggest growth areas in the next 12-24 months. As data breaches and viruses continue to headline in the news, companies are turning to IT service providers to help educate them and keep them safe. Service providers who do not evolve to become a managed security services provider (MSSP) will start getting beat by their competition and lose opportunities.

In 2018, we surveyed 100+ service providers and 87% reported they had lost customers because they needed more security services they weren’t yet providing. On the flip side, providers who consider themselves an MSSP reported only losing 5% of sales for the same reason. Managed security services is only growing, and if today’s service provider wants to sustain and scale their IT business, they have to expand their offering as well to keep up with the end user demands.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth in 2017? How did it do so?

CK: As the IT channel continues to evolve, Collabrance wants to enhance our offering to meet the needs of our partners and their end-user customers. This past year, Collabrance made it a priority to vet and gather feedback from the IT channel to ensure we built a best-in-class cybersecurity offering. As a result, Collabrance was recognized …

… in the Top 100 MSSPs (MSSP Alert and After Nines Media Inc).

In addition, Collabrance gathered feedback through interviews, surveys and discussions with industry experts to identify challenges preventing MSPs from scaling. To help service providers overcome those challenges, we developed flexible MSP offerings which allow our partners to provide solutions fit for their customers’ needs. As a result, Collabrance has experienced 24%+ growth during our first quarter of this fiscal year.

CF: How does your organization differentiate itself from other MSPs?

CK: As a U.S. -based master MSP, our live-answer help desk and NOC works hard to maintain a 95%+ remote resolution rate and 98%+ customer satisfaction. One of the things you’ll find different with Collabrance is our limited contract commitment and that we do not require service providers to sign annual contracts. Just like our parent company, GreatAmerica Financial Services, we are also privately owned and have no plans to sell.

As an extension of our partner’s team, we understand if they are not successful, we won’t be successful, so we also offer a variety of value-add services to help service providers overcome challenges and continue to scale faster with fewer risks and less overhead.