machineLOGIC

MachineLOGIC’s growth over the past 15 years serves as a model that any MSP would want to follow to improve its market position. Within the past year alone, the company doubled its staff from 10 to 20 employees, and it was recently named one of the 501 most progressive MSPs in the world by MSPmentor. The company provides managed IT services, cloud solutions, and strategic IT consulting to clients ranging in size from 30 employees to more than 600 employees.

Offering live helpdesk support is just one of machineLOGIC’s distinct differentiators, says Peter Hoang, the company’s Director of Business Development. Another core pillar of machineLOGIC’s business is its commitment to choosing the best solutions for its customers — regardless of which vendor offers the most enticing rebate or monetary benefits. “We always do our due diligence before selecting a new product or solution,” says Hoang. “Sometimes this process can take up to 12 months, as it involves a significant amount of effort to ensure that we are offering absolutely the best products on the market to our customers, not just what’s trendy or the flavor of the day.”

New Management Plan Simplifies Backup Maintenance

Seven years ago, around the time Chris Kasten joined machineLOGIC (today he is the Director of Technical Services), the MSP became a Barracuda MSP partner. “We evaluated at least a half dozen backup and disaster recovery [BDR] vendors, and a few factors gave Barracuda MSP the edge,” he says. “First, their product has multi-tenant capabilities, which allows us to see the status of all backups at once. Plus, they allow us to white label their product by adding our logo and branding, and their solution provides more granular backups than other products we evaluated.”

While machineLOGIC has been satisfied with the performance of Barracuda MSP over the years, one area the MSP saw as an opportunity to get even more out of the relationship was in the area of routine maintenance of their customers’ backups.

The MSP has 30 customers of various sizes on Barracuda Intronis Backup, which represents thousands of computing devices being backed up each day. “Maintenance can be time consuming because of obscure Windows errors that pop up, or errors generated as a result of laptops not being connected to a network, forexample. We were resolving only about 50 percent of these errors each day, and we realized we had to get better at it,” says Kasten. “As soon as we discovered the Managed Backup Program, we signed up immediately.”

Success Rates Nearly Doubled With Managed Backup

With the program, the MSP is assigned a dedicated Barracuda MSP engineer who checks on the daily backups and resolves any problems that can be fixed remotely. If something requires an on-site visit, the engineer will initiate a screen share and walk a machineLOGIC technician through the resolution process. “Within a month of starting the program, we already saw big results,” says Kasten. “When we first started, we did about three calls per week with our rep; some calls lasted five minutes and others took an hour. Now we talk once a week and spend less than two hours a week troubleshooting backup issues. Plus, our backup success rate has nearly doubled.”

One of the biggest benefits of the program is dealing with obscure Windows errors, which are the bane of many MSPs’ existence. “What’s different now is that we’re working with an expert who focuses solely on backups and has experience with lots of platforms and configurations,” says Kasten. “Unlike the lengthy process of searching Windows errors online, we are presented with the solution at the same time we become aware of the problem.”

Saving money wasn’t one of the company’s primary reasons for using the Managed Backup program, but it has become an additional benefit. “To achieve this improvement on our own would have required hiring an engineer and most likely taking a month or more to train this person how to troubleshoot backup errors,” says Kasten. “With the Barracuda MSP program, we gain a highly-qualified engineer for about 20 percent of the cost of hiring one. Plus, we no longer have to worry about future scalability. We can sell as many Barracuda MSP solutions and add as many backup agents as we want without ever worrying about whether we have enough internal resources to support them.”