MSPmentor 100: TekLinks Rides The Cloud

teklinks

TekLinks VP of Managed Services David Powell says that the company took a very different route to entering managed services than many of its competitors. The impetus for going into the market, says Powell, was the formation of their first data center, which TekLinks leveraged to provide cloud services — skipping the traditional RMM (remote monitoring and management) market entirely.

From their own cloud infrastructure, TekLinks provides a wide array of hosted services to their midmarket customers. Powell estimates their “sweet spot” at up to 2000 seats. Typical solutions include Microsoft Exchange, online backup, voice-over-IP, and others. Amongst their most popular offerings, Powell says, are cloud servers and private dedicated infrastructure.

And Powell says that while they’re making moves towards endpoint support and monitoring, cloud services have led the growth of their managed services business. Powell says they also offer “co-managed services,” which is a hybrid model that lets customers own and operate some IT assets and leaves the rest to TekLinks.

So what’s next? Well, Powell says to expect some mergers and acquisition action in the months to come as they acquire other local MSPs who could benefit from TekLinks’ cloud infrastructure and three data centers. Essentially, Powell sees the entire managed services market going to the cloud, and is positioning itself to take advantage and get innovative with how to make SaaS sales pitches to customers.

This is part of our weekly look at MSPmentor 100 companies. The annual MSPmentor 100 report, published each February, identifies the world’s leading MSPs. Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. And follow us via RSS,Facebook, Identi.ca; and Twitter. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.