Looking to boost revenue and customer loyalty by adding new offerings to your managed service portfolio? Here are four possibilities that merit consideration. 

By Rich Freeman

Ask many MSPs to name their strategy of choice for making more money and they’re likely to reply, “Get more clients.” But collecting more income from the clients you already have by providing them additional services works just as well, and has the added advantage of making you that much more indispensable to them—and therefore that much less vulnerable to competitors.

The trick, of course, is figuring out which services to add, especially if you’ve exhausted all of the obvious candidates. Happily, new managed service opportunities are appearing all the time. The following four are especially worth considering. 

Managed Audio/Visual
One of the more promising new services, managed audio/visual, is known by many names. Some call it managed telepresence. Others prefer managed teleconferencing or managed videoconferencing. However, most everyone agrees on these two points: It entails administering technologies that businesses use to communicate and collaborate remotely, and it’s growing like gangbusters.

Indeed, analyst firm ABI Research expects global spending on managed telepresence and videoconferencing services to achieve a heady 19 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years, reaching $1.2 billion by 2016.

SMBs are likely to be an active part of that spending surge, according to Matt Hendrickson, vice president of marketing at ConnectSolutions Inc., a provider of cloud-based conferencing and unified communications solutions based in Burlingame, Calif. “A lot of smaller companies are looking to grow, and they’re looking for ways to increase their productivity without increasing their costs,” he says. Managed A/V fits the bill perfectly, because it equips employees to interact more effectively with customers and business partners, yet can be paid for at affordable rates out of the operating budget.

Just be sure you know what you’re getting into if you plan to host a telepresence solution yourself, Hendrickson cautions. “I would argue this is one of the most complex areas of technology anywhere,” he says. “It just touches every aspect of your network infrastructure.” And since most businesses that use conferencing solutions consider them mission critical, they typically have little tolerance for downtime. “The SLAs are relentless,” Hendrickson observes. “You have to have 24-hour, round-the-clock support.”

Consequently, many channel pros find reselling a hosted third-party service more palatable than building their own. Glowpoint Inc., of Murray Hill, N.J., for example, is actively recruiting VARs for its cloud-based managed video platform, and Cisco Systems Inc. introduced a similar SMB-oriented service named TelePresence Callway in October 2011. The San Jose, Calif.-based company plans to market the new offering exclusively through members of its Cisco Authorized Partner Program. 

Another hot audio/video option is reselling and maintaining the Mondopad, a 55-inch touchscreen tablet computer with integrated videoconferencing. Introduced in June 2011 by InFocus Corp., of Portland, Ore., the system is available at an SMB-friendly price point just under $6,000.

For John Cannata, at least, it was love at first site. Cannata is president of CMIT Solutions of West Metro Denver, a solution provider and MSP in Littleton, Colo. “When I first saw one I said, ‘Wow, I don’t know why, but I need one,’” he recalls. “It was a very quick decision for me to become a reseller.”

So far, it’s a choice he hasn’t regretted. Every Mondopad deal Cannata closes produces one-time hardware revenue and recurring management fees. And since most of his Mondopad sales are to net-new customers with no prior relationship, the longer-term financial impact is potentially even greater. “I’m hoping that at some point people will see that the Mondopad is the most reliable component on their network, and that might open opportunities,” he says.

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