The Toronto-headquartered outsourced help desk services provider promotes longtime RMM exec Obaseki to its senior ranks as it looks to expand both its MSP base and strategic partnerships.

Toronto-headquartered GMS Live Expert, the outsourced help desk services division of Global Mentoring Solutions [GMS], has announced the promotion of Danny Obaseki to VP of Sales. He joins the senior leadership team at a time when GMS Live Expert is aggressively broadening out its go-to-market mechanisms.

Obaseki was a longtime Partner Development Manager at Ottawa-based RMM [Remote Monitoring and Management] vendor Level Platforms, who left that company soon after its 2013 acquisition by AVG, and like some other Level Platforms refugees, eventually found his way to GMS. He was hired in January 2016 as Director of Business Development, and moved to the Director of Partner Development role that November, which he held until his present promotion.

The Sales VP role at GMS Live Expert combines the hunter focus of the business development area with the farmer one of partner development.

“I’m basically doing both sides,” Obaseki said. “I help from a strategic standpoint to grow new MSP customer acquisitions, and also help the partner development management team come up with new ways to nurture current our current partners. My goal is to help MSPs grow, from a Go-to-Market standpoint – helping them price their offerings, package them, and position them in the marketplace. We have an amazing senior leadership team led by [CEO] Wayne [Goldstein] and [COO] Cindy [Perks]. They have been doing a great job for the last two decades and that’s why we have a strong reputation in this market. I’m here to help bolster that market, with my 14 years of experience in the MSP space. They needed another person at the table to help make strategic decisions.”

While GMS Live Expert is based in Canada, and has a very important outsourcing contract with a large Canadian telco, most of its MSP partners are in the U.S.

“The Canadian MSP base is less than ten per cent of the total, although we do have some large and mid-sized ones in Canada,” Obaseki stated. “The majority is U.S.-based, which is natural in the MSP space, because there is a much larger pool of MSPs there. Our ability to close tickets quickly is the primary goal, but we focus on helping MSP partners augment their supports offerings. Many don’t have the bandwidth to swim upstream. We provide Level 2 support and up as well, with techs who have an average of 7.5 certifications per person. Many MSPs invest in training these advanced techs, and then they leave for more money elsewhere. That’s a common issue, and we take that off the table completely.”

Obaseki said that the company is aggressively expanding its MSP partner base, and looking to expand key strategic partnerships as well.

“We are pretty aggressive in new customer acquisition,” he said. “We attend as many trade shows as we can to create awareness among MSPs, and use social media for that as well. “Extending partnerships with key RMM/PSA vendors is a priority. We pride ourselves on being vendor-agnostic, but it’s a natural evolution for us to partner with these organizations.” They are presently partnered with Kaseya. They will also be at the Datto show next month, where they are a Gold sponsor, although they do not yet have a formal relationship with Datto. Last fall they also partnered with U.K.-based InBay, which provides similar services in Europe, to provide an offshore supplement to their own support capabilities.

“We recently built out an ROI calculator that both partners and prospective customers can leverage, on whether to build a help desk internally,” Obaseki noted. “We are also a month away from releasing a new partner portal that we have been working on for a year. We provide partners with metrics and the portal will allow partners to pull reports at any time and monetize them.”