Sherweb Aims To Help Partners Scale, Tackle Cloud Challenges

‘You need to be able to work with the clients you have today and be able to never say no to an opportunity in the future,’ said Michael Slater, head of sales and marketplace at cloud distributor Sherweb. ‘Scale should never be a problem for you if you pick the right vendors to work with.’

Solution providers have network issues, security incidents, help desk demand and challenges training clients and employees, which can be burdens on operations that make it difficult to scale, said Michael Slater, head of sales and marketplace at cloud distributor Sherweb.

Slater (pictured far right), along with Jim O’Driscoll, vice president of sales at Sherweb (far left), spoke Sunday during CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange March 2022 conference in Dallas about how Sherweb can help partners scale their business by alleviating many of their operational burdens.

According to a 2021 CompTIA report cited during the presentation, 43 percent of channel firms are worried about the challenge of scale. Seventy-one percent of MSPs consider helpdesk a top revenue generating service.

“It’s been interesting watching the market change and evolve,” Slater said. “A great example is cybersecurity. You’re worried about infrastructure. You’re worried about cloud support. You’re worried about billing, but you’re not just worried about what you’re billing your client.

“What does this create? A tremendous amount of downward pressure ,” Slater said. “The question becomes, how do you scale without sacrificing delivery or customer experience?”

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With Sherweb, they can offer one solution that addresses all of these challenges.

“You need to be able to work with the clients you have today and be able to never say no to an opportunity in the future,” he said. “Scale should never be a problem for you if you pick the right vendors to work with.”

After acquiring Global Mentoring Solutions (GMS) last year, Sherweb is able to expand these helpdesk solutions.

“We can call it outsourcing, we can call it augmenting, it doesn’t have to be a full outsource,” O’Driscoll said. “If want to move to user-support business hours [or] you want to go seven-by-24, we have options for that. We’re very flexible. We’re really focused on giving you the flexibility to fit into your model so that you can grow.”

Sherweb’s helpdesk can be both enduser support or NOC (network operations center) support, he added.

Sherweb brought two executives up on stage from Infinite IT Solutions, Joe Ussia, CEO (center right), and Chris Stock, CIO (center left), to share first-hand experience of how the distributor is helping their operations.

Infinite IT Solutions’ biggest challenge was after-hours support. After partnering with Sherweb to address that challenge, the solution provider could take on bigger clients and scale quickly with them, the executives said.

Sherweb has helped the solution provider reduce its time to market and reduced its time to “spin new services up for customers,” which has helped when it is experiencing staffing shortages.

Sherweb’s services also help on the sales side, as partners are no longer afraid to scale and feel confident going after larger clients.

Infinite IT Solutions saw its business “explode” with Sherweb as the distributor was able to help with operations, seeing 4,000 to 5,000 percent growth since it partnered with the distributor.

Slater said it’s all about working together pre-sale through to the post sale.

“Bad support is bad, and very good support is loyalty,” Slater said. “Pick somebody that can make sure that day 30 is as smooth as day one.”

Jeff Gardner, owner of Utah-based solution provider Raidius LLC, said it’s good to know that Sherweb is a company that partners can heavily rely on.

“They seem to be doing a little bit of everything,” he said of Sherweb. “And [outsourcing our helpdesk] is going to be something we’re looking at really soon.”