Over the years I have purchased a lot of things, I am guessing you probably have as well. Whether it is a new washer or dryer, a tool to fix or build something, a lawn mower, or a hundred other things; there is one truth that I have found to be a solid fact – over and over and over again – you get what you pay for, particularly when it comes to managed services providers.
I have been in the technology world for over 15 years, and have experience with LOTS of managed services providers that I have worked for and consulted with, of all shapes and sizes. This inarguable fact has also been present in all these managed services companies – you really do get what you pay for. Let’s examine what is the difference between two managed services providers; one that charges a premium for their services, and one that charges much less, we’ll call them cheap. This is what I have seen:
Premium MSP |
Cheap MSP |
| They are more stable of a company and understand what they need to be successful in serving their clients. | They are less stable as a company and typically do not understand how to price their services or know what it will take to make their clients successful. |
| They differentiate themselves by the value and level of service they give to their clients. | They differentiate themselves by price, because they can’t compete on service levels or in other value driven models. |
| They understand that technology is a strategic asset and they use that knowledge to help their clients be more successful and profitable in business. | They understand technology is an important tool, but don’t have the business skills to help their clients properly plan or use those tools to create profitability for other benefits for their clients. |
| They have highly advanced tools to manage their clients to properly prevent issues and secure the network and systems better. | They use the cheapest tools possible, which only gives them a small set of features to use to help their clients. |
| They value skill and know they have to pay for good skill to serve their clients better. They have great training programs to consistently keep their technicians up to date. | They do not have training programs. They “hope” their technicians will get certified on their own time. |
| They provide their clients with insightful reporting to show the value of their service. | They don’t provide insightful reporting. |
| They meet quarterly and annually to help their clients plan for technology and work with them to make sure that their technology is being used to advance the strategic initiatives of the client. | The wish they had the time to perform quarterly and annual reviews. |
| They perform test restores on client backups every single month. | They only monitor alerts and hope the data will be recoverable if there is a problem. |
| They understand that security is a critical component of network health and have invested in internal training and tools to ensure they are on the leading edge of security. | They don’t believe any hacker would target their clients, so they don’t spend too much time on it, but do the basic things. |
| They are able to support a wide range of applications and hardware in order to serve different client needs. | They are able to support a small set of core applications and hardware. |
| They monitor every single log and alert generated from clients and have very expensive tools to assist them in the analysis and resolution. | They setup a few alerts and monitoring of client servers, but don’t have the time to really dedicate to reviewing them. |
| They understand the value of metrics and have advanced systems to pull data for analysis and forecasts of service levels and capacity in the organization. | They think numbers are cool, but don’t give the “real” picture. They hire based on stress levels, than on forecasting capacity. |
| They manage service by guaranteed service levels agreements. | They generally do not understand SLAs, nor include them in their agreements. |
I could go on and on with many more examples, but the truth still stands, you get what you pay for. It could be true that you could have a mediocre company that charges a lot for their services, but “by their fruits, ye shall know them.” In the end, a cheap managed services provider is no different than a cheap vacuum, eventually they will break down, and leave their clients in a wake of destruction. JMARK of course is on the left side of this table, but that does not mean we are outside of your price range. Contact us so we can show you the true value that we provide to our clients.
