Where CSP is Headed in 2017

In 2016, many partners and advisors jumped on the CSP train. Microsoft made no bones about the impending Doomsday of its advisor program, nudging them to CSP, while small email hosters appreciated the perks of being able to offer Office 365 too without all of the overhead. However, as more partners are able to offer Hosted Exchange and Office 365, competition for new business—and to keep old business—becomes stiffer as margins are bled out.

The answer of how to keep the lights on at a business lies in the ability to offer additional services that customers need, not just Hosted Exchange and Office 365. In 2017, we can anticipate both the development of new services that can be bundled with Office 365, as well as the channel to shift focus to them. Here are three categories I predict the channel will hone in on based on customer need, as well as suggested services for partners:

 Skype for Business Cloud PBX: Offering voice-over-IP (VOIP) calling over a network and the Internet to users within a company, as well as users in other companies, Cloud PBX in Skype puts clear communicative control in your hands. PSTN calling works with Cloud PBX to grant users calling access to landline and mobile phones, as well. Not only does Skype eliminate the need for old-school PBX hardware, all these features work in tandem with Office 365, so that it’s always updated.

SecureTide: Protecting users’ inboxes from email spam, phishing and malware campaigns with active monitoring and rule creation, SecureTide integrates seamlessly with Office 365 (and is included in every Hosted Exchange subscription through AppRiver). Sophisticated, multi-filter software under the continuous management of highly skilled technicians makes SecureTide more than 99 percent effective in blocking unwanted messages.

SecureSurf: Delivers Web protection at the DNS level to protect a network. Every DNS request originating from a network is checked by SecureSurf to ensure the site is safe. Using a combination of proprietary threat intelligence data (which is updated thousands of times a day), along with other industry leading threat feeds, SecureSurf delivers unmatched protection.

Dynamics 365: Using digital intelligence to harmonize CRM and ERP, Dynamics 365 enables apps to work together across sales, customer service, field service, operations, financials, marketing, and project service automation. Dynamics 365 does this by gathering insights from data it collects on customer relationships and team projects it monitors digitally, creating visual representations of the data so teams can spend less time or reporting, and more time on productivity.

Power BI Pro: Optimized for Office 365, Power BI Pro takes the essential analytics and all of the other building blocks of data and consolidates them in one convenient dashboard. This approach gives a fresh perspective on business, which may help catch emerging conditions before they become concerning trends.

With Power BI Pro, teams have the ability to collaborate on findings using advanced access control settings and additional share functionality, as well as consume live data in the dashboard to give real-time situational awareness right from a connected device or smartphone. The Power BI dashboard can be connected to more than 50 external sources, including Office documents, live analytics, sales suites, directories and more.

If you want more info, give our Channel Sales team a call at 850-932-5338 or submit your information here and we’ll call you back. Come and see for yourself why AppRiver has a 100% partner success guarantee.

Justin Gilbert is channel sales manager, AppRiver.

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.