Seven Managed Services Blog Entries We Didn't Write: March 19

Another week has flown by. Missed deadlines. Dropped cell phone calls. Delayed video posts. Boy, I’m on a roll. Kidding aside, here are seven managed services blog entries that MSPmentor didn’t have time to write for the week ending March 19, 2010.

7. Quick Engagement, Now the Marriage: Only one week after announcing a $350 million deal, CA has completed its buyout of Nimsoft. Now the real fun — and the real work — starts. I’ll be curious to see if CA influences Nimsoft’s annual user conferences (called n-fluence) set for April 6-8 in San Francisco and April 20-22 in London. Also, I’ll be watching to see how CA promotes Nimsoft at CAWorld (May 16-20, Las Vegas). Most importantly, I’ll be checking in with Nimsoft MSPs for their views on CA’s strategy.

6. Smarter MSPs: Tigerpaw Software, the PSA (professional services automation) software provider, launched Journal Connect for Outlook. The software integrates Microsoft Outlook email into an MSP’s historical notes — so that the MSP gets a clearer view of correspondence with customers and prospects.

5. Let’s Play 2 (or 3): MSP coach Stuart Selbst recently completed his Spring Training for Business conference in Arizona. Next, he may host a similar event in Canada and perhaps an employee-focused MSP event on the East Coast.

4. Less Shelfware, More Success: There’s some chatter from N-able that a greater and greater percentage of its licenses are active rather than sitting on the shelf. I’ll be searching for more answers next week. Also, I’ve completed a video interview with N-able CEO Gavin Garbutt… now I just need to edit and publish it.

3. MSP Megatrends: Level Platforms CEO Peter Sandiford is back with the latest chapter of his 7 megatrends blog series for MSPs. This one involves SaaS and cloud trends. I’m still skeptical that MSPs will make a buck monitoring Microsoft BPOS and other SaaS applications for customers. After all, don’t customers just expect Microsoft and Google applications to stay online? Still, there’s room in this market — somewhere — for MSPs and VARs to profit from SaaS and cloud.

2. Playing an Encore?: Now that Autotask has discussed its takeover strategy for VARStreet, imagine the following scenario: A closer working relationship between Autotask and OnForce. In theory, a VAR or MSP could have a single dashboard to (A) bid on customer projects via OnForce (B), source the customer products from VARStreet then (C) manage the project using Autotask.

Yes, Autotask and OnForce have already done some work together. And OnForce CEO Peter Cannone attended the 2009 Autotask Community Live event. But multiple sources across the industry tell me more Autotask-OnForce work is coming. Soon.

1. Rise of Cloud Integrators?: Actually, this is a blog we did get around to writing. We’re hearing a lot of hype about so-called Cloud Integrators. But is the hype real? Here’s some analysis.

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