Advantage Technology

MSP Challenges

• Operated mostly as a break-fix VAR, but found it challenging to accurately forecast, difficult to factor value-added services into pricing, and found out there were missed revenue opportunities.
• Previously, the company’s BDR offering comprised a mix of hardware, software, and data center services from various vendors, which led to constant intervention and trouble-shooting.

Solutions

After Nina Shell joined the company, several changes were implemented as the company transitioned from being a break-fix VAR to an MSP:

• They replaced their legacy BDR point products with Barracuda Backup, a subscription-based appliance that simplifies backup and recovery services.
• They added backup and security protection for their Office 365 customers by bundling in Barracuda Essentials for Office 365. The MSP is also selling Barracuda Sentinel, a managed phishing detection solution that uses AI to learn an organization’s unique communications patterns to identify and block real-time spear phishing attempts.
• To incentivize its salespeople to sell managed services, the MSP pays them the first month’s installment of the contract and then annually upon contract renewal.

Results

• The MSP now has a true disaster protection offering that meets all of its customers’ recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements.
• The MSP doubled its recurring revenue last year.
• The MSP is projecting $5 million growth in the coming year due mainly to landing a large contract with a school system combined with its recurring revenue growth.

Robust product features help save time

“Included with our managed services offering is quarterly BDR testing. Barracuda MSP’s virtualization and bare-metal restore capabilities enable us to run a full test in about an hour. Without these features, it would be an all-day project. In fact, in a real disaster recovery scenario, if users don’t have virtualization and bare-metal restore, they’re typically looking at nearly a week of downtime after taking into account procuring and shipping a new server, adding the software, and transferring the data.” —Nina Shell, Sales Director, Advantage Technology