Watercooler Suite: Blending SaaS With Managed Services

A tipster sent a link to Watercooler Suite our way. It’s an intriguing offering that potentially shows peer MSPs how to price, brand and market their managed services to small businesses. The pitch: for as little as $129 per per month, Watercooler Suite will deliver managed Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, cloud storage, antivirus, spam filtering, mobile device support, and a laundry list of other common business needs, all through the cloud. Here’s the scoop.

In addition to those features I mentioned above, Watercooler Suite delivers calendar, address book, email archiving, and Outlook 2010. It’s contract-free and platform-independent, with pricing plans ranging from $129/month for 3 users and 50GB of cloud storage all the way to $749 for 25 users and 500GB.

No individual piece of Watercooler Suite is impressive. Managed SharePoint is nothing new, nor is cloud spam filtering. What caught our eye is the vision it represents, providing affordable managed services to businesses that otherwise couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for them, with an easy-to-understand pricing model and a seemingly good grasp on what small businesses need on the IT side.

Of course, without marketing on their side, Watercooler Suite may not go anywhere. But at the very least, it should force MSPs to rethink what they offer and how they offer it.

Side note: Thanks to Stuart Selbst for the heads up about Watercooler Suite.

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