NetEnrich general manager Justin Crotty

Although it has long served managed service providers and VARs focused on the midmarket, outsourced NOC specialist NetEnrich feels it’s time for a change.

While the company has taken a bundled approach to the SMB market since last year, its engagements through MSPs and VARs with midmarket companies were too often heavily customized, according to NetEnrich general manager Justin Crotty.

“A lot of our partners in the market like the service offering we have there, but the challenge was that it wasn’t well-defined,” Crotty said. “We had a packaging issue.”

The company is aiming to eliminate that packaging issue with the launch of Mission Critical Operations packages, which aim to create bundles of commonly-consumer services, and ease the quoting and pricing process for the company’s solution providers.

Under the previous midmarket plans, Crotty said that too often its MSPs were “at our mercy” to define midmarket solutions. The company worked with 30 of its midmarket-focused MSPs to define what the most common needs are and build the Mission Critical Operations bundles to meet those needs.

The new packages are available through the company’s two North American distribution partners, Ingram Micro and Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions, and include managed infrastructure solutions around commonly used midmarket solutions, including the Microsoft business application stack, virtualized environments, data centre environments, unified communication, VOIP and networking gear.  The packages are available in BU100 and BU200 bundles, with the 200-level bundle offering greater numbers of included applications, virtual hosts or network devices.

Beyond the initial bundles, the company still offers a variety of a la carte add-ons. So while some degree of customization with NetEnrich will still be required, solution providers will be better able to define the solution and then validate that solution with NetEnrich, rather than relying on the vendor to provide the full scope of the deployment.

While the company has always been able to turnaround requests for midmarket solutions, Crotty said it’s been tough for solution providers to communicate the value of the solution because there were no pre-defined marketing or communications tools that fit the specific solutions defined. With the bundling approach of MCO, that changes, he suggested.

“This is a pricing and simplicity exercise, but it’s also about value communication,” Crotty said.

The company has long served the midmarket and midmarket-focused VARs, but Crotty said that more of the company’s SMB-focused solution providers are looking to the midmarket as a way to expand their focus.

“They have a stable of SMB customers, but a lot of their profitability comes from the midmarket segment,” he said. “In order to move upmarket, they need a lot more help from the technology platform, processes and the technology depth and breadth we can offer. They know we can bring an enterprise-class product to the market, and we can help them move up.”