For the love of IPOD...
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@Jimmy9008 said in For the love of IPOD...:
They were an MSP. The selling SAN part was only a small part of what they did.
It's a taint. And one that clearly drove the MSP side. It was enough that in a casual description of them, I was able to detect that their actions were totally determined by their VAR aspect, not their MSP aspect. It might feel to you that it was a small amount of what they did, but there are some good threads here about how any VAR is all VAR - it changes how you interact with customers, how you think about advice and everything that you do.
From the description, it sounds like the VAR side determined everything that they did. Their entire support model only makes sense if they gave in to the VAR aspects and let it drive everything from servers to storage to support.
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@Jimmy9008 said in For the love of IPOD...:
Any disaster the whole server had to be rebuilt rather than an image restore. Again, because its what they knew rather than developing and using the latest tech. Makes sense for them, but bad for the tech/development and customers
All of that can be attributed to the VAR aspects overriding the MSP concerns. An MSP services customers, a VAR does not. They are opposing forces - a fundamental conflict of interest.
In this example here, the VAR aspect makes money by introducing disaster, it produces more stuff to sell. There is no interest in learning good tech (not modern, just good) because that would be totally opposed to the VAR nature of the business where their own best interest is what they represent, rather than the customers. In a really, really good separation business, there is a theory that you can have MSP consultants and managers with zero ties to the VAR business and no influence by it, but you'd have to have a strong central management that has no influence lower down the chain and totally separation of the two without any crossing staff. No small business can do that, making any small MSP with some VAR.... totally VAR. It influences everything.
The VAR nature is to sell as much as can be sold for the highest possible margins. A VAR is a seller's agent, not a buyer's agent. An MSP is supposed to be on the buyer's side. In the US, there are even cases where sitting on both sides of that fence is a legal problem.
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@Jimmy9008 this thread about starting a small business ended up having some excellent discussion diving into looking at how the VAR aspect of a consulting business, no matter how small, was considered to be a conflict of interest that could not be overcome. I think that it, while long, had some great looks at both how many of us could not perceive any VAR as anything but all VAR; and how even the smallest reselling created difficulties how one things about the rest of the business. And this was on a tiny scale with extreme limitations.
Things like selling SANs are the extreme opposite end of the scale. As we've seen from many dealings - the margins on a typical SAN sale are so extreme that a VAR can push SAN so hard as to lose 90% of potential customers but if that push sells a SAN to the 10% of remaining customers then it was worth it because that small number of sales of something with margins so large is better than smaller margins to many. At 200 customers buying SANs, for example, it would have been worth it to have lost 1,800 customers because of selling SANs financially, if that makes sense. So an MSP that sells 200 SANs is "bigger" than an MSP with 2000 customers that does not sell SANs, in that example.
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@BBigford said in For the love of IPOD...:
@dafyre said in For the love of IPOD...:
@DustinB3403 said in For the love of IPOD...:
Better yet. . .
"If they can afford 1 SAN, they can certainly afford 2, and make things truly solid". . .
that would be commission + just good IT.
Of course horrible finance control, but whatever.... with just a single SAN its still horrible finance control.
Would it not be a good time to start pitching better setups such as Starwinds Appliances?
Funny... I actually did bring that up, and was told since nobody has heard of them, then they probably weren't very good. I thought they were joking, but they weren't.
Who told that? Competitor?
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@KOOLER said in For the love of IPOD...:
@BBigford said in For the love of IPOD...:
@dafyre said in For the love of IPOD...:
@DustinB3403 said in For the love of IPOD...:
Better yet. . .
"If they can afford 1 SAN, they can certainly afford 2, and make things truly solid". . .
that would be commission + just good IT.
Of course horrible finance control, but whatever.... with just a single SAN its still horrible finance control.
Would it not be a good time to start pitching better setups such as Starwinds Appliances?
Funny... I actually did bring that up, and was told since nobody has heard of them, then they probably weren't very good. I thought they were joking, but they weren't.
Who told that? Competitor?
That, or his management, lol.
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@KOOLER said in For the love of IPOD...:
@BBigford said in For the love of IPOD...:
@dafyre said in For the love of IPOD...:
@DustinB3403 said in For the love of IPOD...:
Better yet. . .
"If they can afford 1 SAN, they can certainly afford 2, and make things truly solid". . .
that would be commission + just good IT.
Of course horrible finance control, but whatever.... with just a single SAN its still horrible finance control.
Would it not be a good time to start pitching better setups such as Starwinds Appliances?
Funny... I actually did bring that up, and was told since nobody has heard of them, then they probably weren't very good. I thought they were joking, but they weren't.
Who told that? Competitor?
Likely someone who had heard of them quite a lot, lol.
