Managed services for the Mac?

Did you know that 32 per cent of businesses are looking to move from PC to Mac?

Does your Managed Services Provider (MSP) offer Mac IT management?

Last month I had a chance to sit down with Jason Dettbarn, founder and CEO of Miami-based Addigy, Inc. What I learned from Jason may mean there is a huge opportunity for managed service providers to be unearthed.

The most successful businesses provide an answer to a problem that was previously unsolved. The problem that Addigy focuses on is that many talented people would prefer to use Macs for their work, but Macs don’t get near as much support as PCs in the MSP community, and the IT management tools that are available to Macs can be frustrating. You have to set up servers, create packages, and pay for hours of training.

Addigy has instead decided to provide tools necessary to keep Macs up-to-date and running smoothly, and they make it simple and easy to do so.

Dettbarn said: “Enterprise organizations and mid-size organizations keep pushing back on bringing Macs into the organization because they lack the tools to manage them properly. And that’s the problem, all the products on the market today are very heavy and difficult to get started with, and we saw a big opportunity to help those organizations manage their Macs.”

Are MSPs missing the mark when it comes to Macs?

Dettbarn believes they are. “When it comes to Macs, because they don’t have the right tools, they’re shoving a few of those deals away. But, on the PC side, as we’ve seen in the last three or four years, there’s a race to the bottom of the margins for services. Other competitors try to come in and they negotiate their rates down even further every month.”

“On the Mac side, these are organizations that invest more money in their IT assets. They invest more in that aluminum hardware, and they really require those people that are using them to develop and create a lot of expensive products. And that’s why the actual margins are a lot better on the Mac side,” he added.

According to Dettbarn, as an MSP you have to play the role of the Mac user in need of IT help.

  • Where are all my assets at?
  • What is the state of them?
  • Are the drives encrypted?
  • Am I low on disk space?
  • Am I approaching my warranty dates?

“At any moment we can see where those assets are at and take action,” Dettbarn said.

“We can go and apply policies and this is a big difference compared to everybody else in the marketplace. You don’t create packages, you just choose from a catalog of software. There are a couple hundred software applications we offer. You just choose those, and push them out to the machine. There’s no on-premise server required, nothing’s required other than just a cloud account.”

There is a myth that Macs are inherently virus-free, impregnable machines, but this is not truly the case. One of the managed services you must add is ensuring Macs are actually free of infection, while also including the latest and most advanced encryption techniques for better security. MSP should also provide inventories of the current state of your Apple systems, including CPU, memory, and hard drive capacity.

Take note: you can’t afford to stop offering Mac IT management for your clients. The game is changing, and businesses are moving away from the traditional PC.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Stuart Crawford
Stuart Crawfordhttp://www.ulistic.com/
Stuart Crawford is an MSP marketing specialist and coaching professional. He is president of Ulistic Inc., a managed services coaching, mentorship, sales and outsourced marketing services firm. For more info call u 716.799.1999 or email [email protected]

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