GMS Live Expert and Inbay each provide outsourced services to MSPs on different sides of the Atlantic, and have partnered to provide a ‘hands across the sea’ set of enhanced services available to partners of both companies.
Dan Goldstein, GMS Live Expert’s Director
Toronto-headquartered Global Mentoring Solutions, with its GMS Live Expert brand that provides outsourced help desk services, has announced a partnership with UK-based, Inbay, which provides NOC and project services capabilities to MSPs. The partnership will make the specialized services and capabilities of both companies available to the MSP partners of each, giving them access to more differentiated capabilities to better serve their customers.
Companies from very different geos which provide 24/7 support sometimes partner to improve their capabilities to offer that support. That is not what this partnership is about.
“We have done strategic partnerships before, particularly one with Kaseya,” said Dan Goldstein, GMS Live Expert’s Director. “This is, however, the first time that we have collaborated with another company with whom we compete in some ways. As MSPs increasingly look for more boutique offerings to differentiate themselves, we can provide that through this partnership.”
Through the partnership, MSPs will be able to access GMS’s North American-based Outsourced Help Desk and NOC as well as Inbay’s offshore NOC services 24/7, 365 days a year. They are offering joint, flexible service solutions that cover time-consuming support areas to free up an MSP techs for higher value-add work.
“They have a great European presence, and specialize in the NOC side of the business,” Goldstein said. “They have a Sri Lanka-based team that allows us to offer our MSPs a lower-cost NOC option. We think that many of our MSPs will find that attractive, particularly for alert monitoring and project work. They are also great at device level monitoring and management, and have a cool Datto monitoring and management package.”
Inbay benefits in turn from the specialized Help Desk services that GMS Live Expert provides.
“That’s the big attraction on their side, the help desk service that we offer,” Goldstein said. “Both of us will also benefit from the exchange of best practices.”
The partnership came about following a chance meeting at a conference between Wayne Goldstein, Global Mentoring Solutions’ CEO, and Kristian Wright, Managing Director at Inbay.
“They hit at off and overcame their initial trepidation about the fact that we are competitors in some ways,” Goldstein said. “They both kept an open mind, and the partnership developed over the last six months.”
GMS Live Expert’s base is primarily in Canada, but they do have a North American presence, with 135 techs in Canada and the U.S. combined. They have approximately 400 MSP partners. They see the partnership as providing an opportunity for them to grow further in two ways – expanding their presence in Europe, and increasing the number of partnerships they have with larger MSPs.
“We are looking to leverage their European presence to grow over there,” Goldstein indicated. “We are also looking to partner with more larger MSPs, and we think that being able to provide our outsourced help desk option for their big partners will accomplish that for us. We are able to offer a great deal of customization around help desk processes, and can get very granular with it. We think that will be an attraction to larger MSPs, and will help us go deeper among them.”
