Want to grow your revenues? Think Microsoft managed services.
Partner
As an MSP, you basically have three options if you want to grow your revenues: go out and win more customers, sell more to the customers you have, or try to do both. Whichever path you choose, you need a killer offer, and these days it’s tough to beat a Microsoft Teams service. Millions of businesses rely on Teams for productivity, which means the potential market is huge. And has become strategically critical: companies need it to perform with high reliability and zero friction. MSPs who can deliver that kind of experience have a wide-open door to revenue growth. While many MSPs already offer some form of Teams service, few would be willing to stake their reputations on assuring reliability and seamlessness. The limits of conventional tools — including native Microsoft tools — make even basic monitoring a bridge too far, fraught with the risks of getting bogged down in troubleshooting and constantly chasing the next crisis. Partly what’s needed are better tools. But also, to differentiate themselves, MSPs need to think beyond monitoring — because that’s where the real value lies.
Microsoft managed services need more than monitoring alone
Monitoring is literally the act of keeping an eye on something, watching to make sure certain parameters hold and thresholds are maintained. That’s what native Microsoft tools like Call Quality Dashboard, Admin Center and Service Dashboard, and Meeting Room Pro Dashboard do — albeit in a limited and fragmented way. You get some real-time visibility and alerting. But by that point you’re already in troubleshooting mode — reliability has taken a hit and users are experiencing friction. Something more is needed. Monitoring is a piece of it, but far more valuable to enterprises is proactive Teams management. In a proactive management model, you’re identifying and addressing issues before users are affected to keep Teams running smoothly. When problems do occur, you’re able to respond quickly and get things back up and running. To deliver Microsoft managed services on that level without totally overburdening your team, you need the right tools.
Three critical capabilities for proactive Microsoft managed services
Specifically, proactive Teams management hinges on three things: synthetic testing, end-to-end network path tracing, and consolidated insights and analytics. Synthetic testing enables proactivity. It involves automated, continuous testing of Teams functions and the Teams network environment — in the background, by autonomous bots — to surface trouble spots before users encounter them. End-to-end network path tracing empowers your team to pinpoint exactly where problems are occurring, whether at a user endpoint, inside the client’s local network, in an ISP network or somewhere within the Microsoft domain. That visibility and precise root cause analysis — which can extend even to a remote user’s wi-fi network — eliminate guesswork and also make it hard for third parties to pass the ‘accountability hot potato’. When you can give the IP address of the element that’s underperforming, it’s hard for a service provider to argue. Insights and analytics correlated across multiple data sources and captured in a single console further enhance Teams management capabilities by making it possible to identify trends and patterns and prevent recurring issues over time.
The right combination to unlock Teams revenues
Synthetic testing, path tracing and analytics make troubleshooting and issue resolution faster and less of a burden so it’s easier for your team to deliver true Teams management. Meanwhile, the proactivity they enable adds strategic value to your Microsoft managed services — attracting prospects and strengthening the loyalty of your existing clients. All of that adds up to real potential to grow your managed service revenues, whether you choose to enhance or expand on an existing service, bundle Teams monitoring with other services, or add all-new Teams services to your mix. Martello’s Vantage DX is the only solution on the market today purposely designed for this kind of proactive Teams management, with synthetic testing, network path tracing and intelligent analytics built in.
