Managed Services: 7 Blogs MSPmentor Didn't Write, Week of May 1

It’s been a busy 2015 for MSPmentor so far as this blogger spent untold hours working on the MSPmentor 501 list and getting it published in its many forms. Thank you all for your participation, and we are looking forward to sharing some of the research findings shortly. In the meantime, here are seven blogs we didn’t have time to write this week.

1. Continuum announced that “Scaling Up” author Verne Harnish will deliver the company’s closing keynote address at its second annual user conference in Las Vegas on Sept. 29. Harnish’s new book focuses the tools and techniques companies need to build an industry-dominating business. The odds are that he’ll share those tips with attendees, too.

2. Could there be a new free remote monitoring and management tool available to MSPs? The Managed Service Provider Consortium has issued a press release saying that it has created one, built for MSPs by MSPs, that also includes a lead exchange platform. We’ve reached out to them to find out more details.

3. Lots of earnings announcements hit this week, too. SolarWinds (SWI), owner of RMM platform provider N-able, reported MSP and cloud revenue of $14 million for Q1 2015, which executives said reflected an 80 percent growth over the same period last year.  Much of the growth came from the N-able business, but it also included contributions from Pingdom.

4. LogMeIn (LOGM) also reported this week. Our readers will likely remember that LogMeIn Central’s price went up significantly in January.  During this week’s Q2 earnings conference call with analysts, executives fielded questions on the impact of that price increase.

Here’s COO Bill Wagner’s answer, according to the SeekingAlpha transcript of the call: “…we were really pleased with how customers responded to this. And we saw that play out in both strong dollar and account renewal rates. We also saw a positive impact to our new business…

“New sales for both LogMeIn Pro and Central continue to perform well above our expectations. So it’s not just the renewals that we were pleased to see but it’s also the new business. And finally I would just say, keep in mind that these are pretty low cost products and so what we are seeing is that they continue to deliver a durable value for a relatively paltry sum.” 

I don’t think the MSPs who commented on our original story thought that LogMeIn’s new prices were “a paltry sum.” We’ll be interested to see in next year’s MSPmentor 501 research how LogMeIn market share changes year over year for those who use it in their IT management work. Side issue, did you see our list of low-cost LogMeIn alternatives?

5. Other big earnings announcements this week? The VAR Guy did a nice job of collecting cloud revenue growth by three biggies, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, in this story. MSPmentor covered the big AWS cloud revenue breakout last week here.

6. I did speak with the MSP mentioned in that AWS cloud revenue story, Cloudnexa, this past week and will have an executive interview story posted sometime next week.  I’m also looking to get posted a great interview I did with a Dimension Data executive who heads up their managed services for data centers practice. Stay tuned. We’ll be hitting on a key theme in this coverage, too, which is cloud profit margins. What are MSPs seeing as compared to their traditional IT management business margins, and how are they handling any shifts? Expect to see us continue to hone in on this in the year ahead.

7. Speaking of cloud, have you heard the rumors that Salesforce.com is an acquisition target? One of the contenders named as a potential suitor is Oracle, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it. Remember that Oracle has pursued hostile takeovers in the past. I was reflecting on the PeopleSoft deal this past week. Oracle’s initial attempts to buy the publicly held rival failed a couple times, but Oracle prevailed in the end on PeopleSoft. With Salesforce, if Oracle is a bidder, I wonder if anti-trust regulators would let such a deal go through.

8. One more thing. My colleagues and I have been putting together a weekly podcast for you. My goal is to give you an inside track on the hot news of the week in review with commentary provided by the leaders of MSPmentor, The VAR Guy and Talkin’ Cloud. We look at the numbers to see what stories your peers are reading. We bring these stories to you. So take us on your commute, take us to the gym and listen in. We promise we won’t take more than 20 minutes of your time, and you’ll get a new perspective on news relevant to your business.

Did we miss anything else this week? Let us know in the comments.