The gains made by the cloud are seldom lost on anyone. While the cloud is rapidly developing as a source of business and income, for many firms, managed service providers (MSPs) are increasingly finding themselves on the bad side of the income prospect. MSPs often find themselves set to managing services that they played little or no part in installing, required by their customers to keep available despite the minimal connection to their overall operation. So how can MSPs find some extra opportunities to keep all those extra monitoring tools in play?
There are three great ways to give an MSP an edge in terms of extra opportunity, and the first of these is monitoring remote access systems. The growth of the mobile worker – be they the "road warrior" sales rep, the telecommuting engineer or tech writer or the like – has led to an increased demand for remote systems access. When these workers find themselves cut off from the business, frustrations mount as opportunity and productivity alike are lost. Conversely, MSPs can provide the service necessary to get remote workers back up and running.
Second is the monitoring of multi-vendor solutions. Keeping multiple vendors on the same page, as well as keeping their systems operating in harmony, isn't always easy. When problems arise, what part of the chain is truly responsible? The growing complexity of IT solutions is making an opportunity for MSPs to step in and provide a new, valuable service for users.
Finally, getting involved in VoIP gateways is an excellent opportunity for MSPs. The growth of VoIP as a whole is well-established; it's easily on par with the growth of the cloud itself, but using the computer as a telephone brings with it a new potential set of glitches. The tolerance for mistakes is reasonably high with computers, as people expect the occasional failure and take it in stride, but a phone not working is cause for immediate alarm.
One particular vendor that has embraced this concept of finding more potential venues to branch out into is Tone Software (News - Alert), whose ReliaTel VoIP monitoring solution offers several of the necessary points required to get into this line of thought. Monitoring multi-vendor solutions requires that the monitoring system in place be vendor-agnostic; what good is monitoring software that only works with one kind of system in an environment with multiple system types?
Since ReliaTel can also monitor any platform with Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync, it opens up possibilities for remote workers, and it can even handle VoIP gateway monitoring functions as well. In fact, ReliaTel can provide information on user experience as well as call quality statistics, giving a deeper and better overall picture of what's going on during each call. Sure, a simple ping can handle the question of "Is the gateway up or not?" but in order to get to the bottom of call quality, much more information needs to be made available – the kind that ReliaTel can offer.
The thing about any major technological development – whether it be the cloud or VoIP or anything else – is that it always brings new opportunity with it. Sometimes that opportunity isn't obvious, but sometimes it can be pretty clear and substantial. Not taking advantage of a known opportunity isn't a smart move, so taking a closer look at the services MSPs can offer with an eye toward offering new ones is a very smart move indeed.
To learn more about Tone’s ReliaTel VoIP monitoring solution as well as all of its offerings, visit www.tonesoft.com.
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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo