MSP360 has also formally rolled out MSP University, which has reworked their educational offerings to make them easier for MSPs to use in a practical way to build their businesses.
Brian Helwig, MSP360’s CEO
A little over a year ago, CloudBerry Lab rebranded to MSP360 as part of a major restructuring strategy to evolve the company from being a backup provider into a much broader platform player, where backup is the flagship service, but still just one service on the platform. This week, MSP 360 released MSP360 Managed Remote Desktop, a major new service for the platform. They also announced the formal rollout of MSP University, as well as an expansion of their U.S.-based technical support staff.
“A big part of the last 18 months has been rebuilding this foundation of the business as a whole, and putting in place the infrastructure for the platform to continue to scale,” said Brian Helwig, MSP360’s CEO. “Last year I was asked what is our mission, and I said that we want to be the number one MSP platform on the planet, to handle everything from end to end. To do this, we had to get sales reps and account retention reps in place that put us in place for our new products. Managed Remote Desktop is the first of these.”
MSP360 Managed Remote Desktop is an easy-to-use management portal for MSPs. It provides simple and secure unattended access to customer endpoints, secure deployment and silent installation, and includes text and voice chat, multi-regional authentication, and an encrypted connection. Since it’s separate from MSP 360 Backup, it works in scenarios where MSPs do not want all endpoints to have backup, something which is more common in Work From Home environments.
“You can see everything end to end,” Helwig said. “It’s a single pane of glass, very robust, and can be deployed with any RMM. It has multi-session capabilities, and is rebrandable. MSPs wanted more remote desktop capability to instantaneously enable backup and replicate it when working on a customer environment. It lets them keep productivity up while this is happening.”
MSP360 Managed Remote Desktop will be free to MSPs for the next 90 days.
“Historically we release everything on-prem first, and allow the MSPs to have software for free in that stage,” Helwig said. “They tell us what we are doing right and then we evolve it further to make it more robust.” When they do charge for the offering, the plan is to do so on a per session model, since MSPs indicated that they preferred that over per desktop or per admin billing.
MSP360 is also formally rolling out MSP University, which was pre-announced earlier this year. It’s not certification-focused training, but rather information designed to give MSPs the business and technical knowledge needed to take their business to the next level.
“Before this, we had a lot of great articles available for MSPs, but they were organized in a mishmash fashion that was hard to find,” Helwig indicated. “They also were not clear on the Step 1, Step 2 element around process. This provides MSPs with the information and assets around our product knowledge. In addition, a lot of MSPs struggle with sales and marketing so we have put together series like ‘how to market on a shoestring budget.’ We want to provide that ‘101’ material. Many MSPs email our marketing team asking this material to be available in Word format instead of PDF, and we use that opportunity to talk with them further about what they are doing in this area.
The MSP University guides include marketing, sales, HR, finance, customer service, and industry-specific topics like security, storage, and BDR. They are all broken down into specific lessons to make them easier to follow.
MSP360 has also announced they have been building up their US-based technical support staff, to complement their European support centre.
“When I started here, we had started to put the U.S. processes in place, and had just a couple individuals in support,” Helwig said. “We have grown that from two to eight people, covering the CT, MT and PT zones – and a little of Australia. It means that we can offer 24×5 service without keeping people up around the clock, and 24/7 is available.”
Looking ahead, Helwig said some big things are on the horizon.
“By the end of this year or early next year – the November- February timeframe, we will have a have a new product coming out,” he stated. “It will help us round out our portfolio and get that ‘aha’ factor.
Helwig also noted that many MSPs are unaware that MSP360 has a purchase option which involves a smaller cash outlay.
“Many MSPs fear laying out capital, so we introduced a monthly purchase option where we ask for one commitment with a five-license minimum for $30 per month. That won’t force them to lay out a lot of capital. The products also have 15 day trials that can be expended – so effectively half the original period is free. We are really trying to eliminate that barrier to entry to market for the small guys. We want MSP 360 to be the best decision for their business, and we do that through our actions, not our words.”
