Ian TaylorVirsae is Disrupting Break-Fix Maintenance Contracts – The Channel Opportunity Explained
An interview with Virsae’s Business Development Director, UK & Europe, Ian McCarthy
In an evolving market where digital transformation (DX) continues to disrupt the traditional comms channel, how do resellers drive new value into their break-fix maintenance contracts? Virsae has just the answer.
As a market-leading provider of UC service management software based in the cloud, Virsae opens up a whole new world of opportunity for channel partners to strengthen their managed service propositions and meet the demands of the modern customer. To tell us more, Ian McCarthy, Virsae Business Development Director for UK and Europe, explains what Virsae’s flagship service, Virsae Service Management has to offer and why it’s the perfect solution for resellers looking to get back that competitive edge.
For McCarthy, he believes the Virsae Service Management platform has truly changed the game by enabling service providers to shift away from those reactive traditional break-fix maintenance contracts that they would typically sell to their customers and allowing them to deliver true managed services instead.
For many channel partners who would have found great value in those traditional break-fix contract models, this shift in preference towards an all-in price per month managed service model has been hugely disruptive, and some organisations have really struggled with it.
However, as the world continues through its digital transformation, customer expectations are evolving and the demand for a more proactive approach to system management is becoming an expectation. Given the way end users consume every day services, the expectation is that these services should be running constantly and, if they do break, phoning up an IT help desk and waiting around for a number of hours for the issue to be resolved is no longer enough.
“There’s an immediate opportunity for resellers to differentiate and generate higher profits by transitioning clients from a standard break-fix maintenance contract to a managed service.”
However the jump from a break-fix to managed services requires a broader approach to service management of a customer’s UC estate. A managed services contract can see the transfer of responsibilities from customer to reseller for measuring system capacity, managing back-ups, deploying new releases and keeping track of UC assets. Taking on these responsibilities while also making a profit can be challenging. Virsae Service Management allows resellers to deliver on contracted managed service deliverables while automating many of the laborious back end functions. That means they get the best of both worlds: Happy customers and happy shareholders.
With regards to who uses Virsae Service Management, McCarthy informs us that the bulk of their business partners are currently those that have a good mix of enterprise-level customers, or customers that are using enterprise-level technology, with most of the traditional voice manufacturers typically having enterprise solutions with 250+ users.
Having said that, with the introduction of cloud-based services, the mid-market is, from an economic point of view, undoubtedly a much bigger part of the UK and offers a much greater turnaround of business.
For instance, somebody signing up a 100-150 seat contract is more likely to have a shorter buying cycle than the enterprise buyers, meaning more of those contracts can be secured with potentially a quicker quote to cash. Recognising this opportunity, manufacturers are developing their products for that space.
A number of traditional resellers that have partnered with Virsae are now building their own cloud services using manufacturers cloud-ready platforms deployed in data centres. Given Virsae Service Management’s native cloud architecture and simple price per user commercial model it becomes the obvious choice to manage cloud platforms end to end.
“Virsae enables resellers to remain relevant and be profitable in a cloud-first market.” adds McCarthy.
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