Today Yesterday, I received the results of a survey recently commissioned by Kaseya. Over 2,200 IT consulting firms responded to the survey with some surprising results. (if I wasn’t so lazy and would have finished this post yesterday, Joe Panettieri wouldn’t have beaten me to the punch on this one).
One thing to make clear, this survey was not sent out to a database of Kaseya customers. There has been some confusion on this and I have tried to clear it up.
The results I was particularly intrigued by was from the final question:
What are your billing projections for 2009?
Remain the same as 2008 – 17.5%
Decrease moderately – 19.3%
Decrease substantially – 23.3%
Increase moderately – 16.4%
Increase substantially – 23.5%
Basically, 60% of the respondents said that their billing revenue will remain the same or decrease in 2009! Another 16.4% said it will increase moderately and 23.5% said it will increase substantially. These numbers really confirm the trend I have been “feeling” (I am a Jedi) within IT Services industry. There are companies out there that GET IT and there are companies that DON’T. There are companies that understand how to position, sell, and deliver their services and there are companies that seem to struggle with this.
I always like the verse: “As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.” There are IT Service companies out there struggling. If your firm is kicking butt, share a few thoughts to sharpen those that may be in a more dismal situation. If you changed something, within your business, in the last year and it has made a huge impact, give back a little by sharing.
Here is a link to the survey. I highly suggest you read it. How do you measure up?
I recently had a conversation with a 5-year veteran of Kaseya. A year ago their firm decided to test the Kaseya Endpoint Security add-on to see if they could free up some of the manual management of the current company recommended solution.
Here is what happened:
Purchased 100 nodes of KES (Kaseya Endpoint Security)
Wrote antivirus application removal scripts to automate the uninstall process (KES won’t install if another AV solution is on the machine)
Installed 100 nodes, of KES, on their own network and a few customer networks. (time required: less than 1-day. KES is pushed out from within Kaseya)
Ran their first scan
Got RESULTS
Found viruses on both their internal network and customer network (over 100)
Found computers that were not getting virus updates
Found machines that had been missed and DID NOT have AV software
Basically, their current delivery of endpoint security was being poorly implemented and maintained. The problem wasn’t their processes, but rather the number of machines they were supporting. The current strategy had become unmanageable and terribly inefficient.
I don’t typically write “sales oriented” blog posts, but this is a no-brainer.
Here are some thoughts to consider:
Most antivirus solutions are domain based and with end-users working virtually, more often, for longer periods of time, you need a solution that can reach out across the Internet.
KES is priced so well that we have customers making a couple thousand dollars extra a month without charging their customers anymore than the previous solution.
It is easier to manage a single console than a bunch of decentralized consoles.
Eminent threats can be mitigated instantly.
One thing I don’t want this post to breed is the typical “this AV software is better than that one”. I am not claiming that KES is the best AV solution on the market. I don’t care how AWESOME another AV solution is at finding viruses. The point I am making is that you can’t insure 100% of your AV agents are working properly 100% of the time without a centralized way to install, run, update, alert, and report back to you. I know some of you may disagree, but if you would rather work on technology than work on your business, well I don’t have a rebuttal for that one. I do know that the guys working on their business play with their “gobs” of money more than their technology.
Bottom line, I am making a business case, not a technology case here, so please comment accordingly.
I want to talk about ratios. Ratios in the ITSP market are a good indicator of profit margins. In the internal IT arena ratios represent maximizing ROI. The ratio I am thinking most specifically about is that of staff to end-users. How many endpoints can one staffer support? This is where no matter what type of organization you are, you can begin to measure and/or quantify the cost or burden for support on a per unit basis. Ratios will mean different things based on your situation but for most they are useful for one or more of the following:
Understanding headcount
Growth planning (strategic non technical, offices, cap ex, etc.)
System Capacity planning
Identifying overages (support costs, headcount, cap ex, etc)
Setting SLA’s (less staff means SLAs may need to slide)
Understanding your profit/loss origins (are you profitable at your current ratio? What ratio do you need have?)
Budgeting (are you always over/under on certain line items in your budget?)
I challenge you to discover the ratios in your business that can lead to meaningful decision making. The ratios may be staff to customers, staff to end users, staff to servers, staff to workstations, servers to workstation, infrastructure spend to users, training to profit, profit to hours, hours to profit, hours to cost. You get the idea. Get to know the ratios that matter most to you then be strategic about setting goals around those ratios.
I want to hear who has the best staff to user ratio. I’ll start with Kaseya’s 1:150.
Sound off in the comments. The best ratio will get featured here.
For the 3,000+ customers who were unable to make the Kaseya User Conference, I HIGHLY recommend watching this important video (161 of you already have)
Grab some food and drink and find a comfy spot because over the next 2 hours, you will learn where Kaseya 6 is going. Be sure to send us your reactions over Twitter (#Kaseya) or comment below.
This mashup was first seen at KaseyaConnect last week and was put together by one of Kaseya Sr Sales Engineers, Ben Lavalley.
As you watch you will notice both blue and red Kaseya bugs. The blue ones represent Kaseya servers and the red ones represent conference attendee servers. Pretty darn cool if you ask me.
Alan Davis – VP, Global Product Services announced, at the user conference, a 6 month goal to improve support at Kaseya. Not only did he state it, but he plans on posting the results on the Kaseya Forum each month. This commitment speaks loudly to his conviction. Here is Alan’s follow up to his announcement at the user conference:
Following on from our User Conference last week, support will be following up each engagement with a short 7 question online satisfaction survey and I would request that you take just a couple of minutes to complete it. The survey will be sent, linked to a particular ticket once it has remained closed for a period of 48 hours. I would ask you to determine your responses based on experience of that particular engagement and complete the survey in all cases as we need to hear how we did in order to continue to improve. For those of you who attended the conference, you will know that in the last survey we received just over a 10% response to these survey requests and I would very much like to take that closer to 100% in order to accurately gauge our progress. I will be publishing the results on this forum monthly as I execute on the improvements I outlined at the conference.In order that we may better address your issues, please raise tickets from your VSA where possible. Give good problem description, steps to reproduce and sample machine id and group id so the techs can take a look. Please also take the time to review the support policy on the support page of the website which gives guidance on how to engage support and what you can expect from us.I look forward to working with you as we implement Service Desk and the customer portal, both of which will enhance our ability to better serve our global community.Best regards Alan Davis
As you can see, he is serious. This message comes just 4 business days after communicating his intentions at the conference. Alan is already getting positive feedback.
The Kaseya blog provides the views and perspectives of the Kaseya Management team on topics including IT Automation, industry best practices and the managed services industry.
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