ScalePad’s Torres To MSPs: ‘Automate As Many Of The Manual Processes That You Have’

‘What you can easily standardize on is your service delivery. Every one of your clients should have the exact same experience whether they are your biggest client or they’re brand new,’ says Eric Torres, vice president of channel at ScalePad, in a session at XChange March 2023.

Eric Torres, vice president of channel at ScalePad

Whether it’s delivering security compliance services or offering IT asset disposition, ScalePad’s Eric Torres said there are unique ways MSPs can tap into more revenue streams and facilitate growth.

Torres, vice president of channel at Vancouver, Canada-based software vendor ScalePad, outlined these opportunities for MSPs at CRN parent company The Channel Company’s XChange March 2023 event in Orlando, Fla., this week.

Based on research from a ScalePad business growth report that surveyed 11,000 of its partners, MSPs said they have “too many” manual processes, “too many buttons to click, too many things that they have to do to uncover the potential revenue, and it’s bogging them down,” Torres said.

“The flip side of that is more than half of you are saying, ‘Once I got these things dialed in, once I started automating as much as I could, that’s when I started seeing a ton of profit. That’s when I started providing a ton of value to my customers,’” he said.

MSPs need to get ahead of the issues, meet with their customers and be that trusted partner to them, Torres said.

“Automate as many of the manual processes that you have,” he said. “What you can easily standardize on is your service delivery. Every one of your clients should have the exact same experience whether they are your biggest client or they’re brand new.”

Then MSPs must strengthen their communication and bond with their customers.

“Once you do all three of those ... you start increasing your efficiency, your profitability and overall operational maturity,” he said.

To do this, Torres said there are four pillars to follow.

“It’s what we deliver our services on,” he said. “We are dedicated to your success as a MSP and your customers’ success.”

As a ScalePad partner, Michael Cervino, president of Radnor, Pa.-based MSP Circle Square Consulting, said Workstation Assurance, a new service offered by ScalePad, is something he sees as a big need for his current customer base.

“Right now we’re having some limited success with reselling the warranties,” Cervino told CRN. “It’s because we don’t have the advance replacement and we’ve got to deal with the depot. So they’re basically overcoming the No. 1 objection our clients have.”

How are the ScalePad offerings that Torres said can help MSPs drive operational efficiency.

Workstation Assurance, IT Asset Disposition

Torres said 64 percent of the servers that MSPs are managing are critical infrastructure at risk due to age, lack of services on that server, warranties and a number of different issues.

“Why is that and why don’t you know about that?” he said. “Because it’s incredibly hard to get this information. It’s a manual data-driven process. It simply takes an enormous amount of time and effort.”

Another pain point is extending warranties and refreshing assets alongside customers.

To combat that, Torres said MSPs can extend maintenance and issue warranties on devices and apply services on top of the them that prolong the life of the equipment.

“And then the best-case scenario for many of us is when it’s the project work, it’s the replacement of those assets,” he said.

To help with this, ScalePad is launching Workstation Assurance, which is an extended warranty on a piece of hardware that fails or needs to be replaced at a moment’s notice.

Another initiative it is launching is IT Asset Disposal of hardware where partners can safely dispose of hardware in an environmentally conscious way. ScalePad will even plant a tree for every asset that is disposed through the service.

Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery Through Backup Radar

Torres said data is the lifeblood of a customer’s company, so MSPs must do anything and everything to protect it.

“We have Backup Radar, which is essentially your RMM for your backup solution,” he told MSPs. “That is a way of effectively managing all the different backup solutions you’re using.”

He said of the MSPs that ScalePad surveyed, they’re doing about 1 million “backup jobs” per day, but 12 percent of them fail.

“As your engineers are looking at this, they start having that vendor fatigue,” he said. “There’s human error that’s involved. What if they miss one of those alerts? That’s where Backup Radar comes into play to say, ‘We’ve got your back on this.’

“We can parse through all that information from all your different vendors, deliver the reporting and deliver the alerting that really matters for you and your customers,” he added.

Cognition360 Insight

This is about knowing what the MSP really has, Torres said. As a former MSP, Torries used to write reports, use a multitude of tools to mine data to determine highly profitable customers and find “where my good techs were sitting and what was really happening with my business itself.”

To streamline that, ScalePad acquired Atlanta-based Cognition360 in February to harness the power of live data that uncovers performance insight.

“This application helps you answer some of the challenging business growth watches that all of you ask yourselves: ‘How profitable is my customer?’” he said. “Are they profitable every single month or is something going to happen in May that’s going to affect that profitability?”

The average Cognition360 partner is seeing profits jump between 10 percent and 15 percent as soon as it on-boards, he said.

Security And Compliance

Since MSPs have become a greater target of hackers since the COVID-19 pandemic, Torres said security and compliance have become that much more important.

MSPs always ask how they become—and stay—compliant and want information about any new compliance requirements they need to be aware of.

To assist with that, Torres said ScalePad acquired Bellevue, Wash.-based software vendor ControlMap, which will further allow ScalePad assist MSPs with all of their compliance-related questions.

“It’s a way to automate the manual process of becoming compliant and staying on top,” he said.