Tips for Growing Your Microsoft Practice

Successful Microsoft channel partners consistently add to the depth and breadth of their businesses in order to stay viable and deliver the most effective products and services to their customers. Whether it’s growing your customer base, expanding your practice areas, or expanding into hosted or managed services, if you’re not moving forward you may be starving your business or even starving for business.

Ten-year-old Ergos Technology Partners Inc., a Microsoft Gold partner and Microsoft Small Business Specialist, located in Houston, Texas, recently added The Planet’s Hosted Small Business Server (SBS) Solution to its managed services offerings. Hosted SBS, a software-as-a-service deal, gives end users access to enterprise class technology that they might not otherwise be able to afford.

Catering to the SMB market, Ergos expects to extend the hosted SMS Solution into its existing base of customers as well as help the IT consulting company reach out to new customers.

“SBS will allow our existing customers to make upgrades or changes without having to invest in new equipment, while the offering is ideal for new customers with 75 seats or less,” says Steve Winter, CEO and president of Ergos. “SBS is extremely reliable and provides customers with redundancy while eliminating risk.”

Ergos is an early adopter of a fully managed services model and offers customers a range of services for a monthly fixed fee. The new hosted offering will help Ergos broaden the scope of products it can offer its customers while it eliminates the need to make hefty investments in infrastructure or assume additional risk.

Winter believes Hosted SBS Solution will help the company accelerate its business, eliminate geographic constraints, and do more with less staff. “I expect the solution will translate into a couple of million dollars in revenue over the next few years,” he says.

Microsoft partnered with The Planet to expand the reach of SBS into the SMB space through its vast network of channel partners.

For Microsoft Gold partner PMV Technologies in Troy, Mich., a three-year-old IT solution company, growing its Microsoft practice means continually expanding on its knowledge of Microsoft products and capabilities, staying ahead with certifications and deepening its relationship with the vendor.

As a strategic technology partner, Microsoft is integrated into everything the solution provider does for its clients. “The more we get involved in our customers' business, the more we help them to make technology decisions that are maximized to improve their businesses and help them meet their business goals,” says Scott Goemmel, partner at PMV Technologies.

Currently growing its customer base 100 percent annually, PMV focuses primarily on the SMB market offering customers outsourced or managed services.

Keeping his finger on the pulse of new technologies that he views as critical to his business and his customers' businesses, Goemmel is focusing his attention on Microsoft’s Unified Communications and Unified Messaging, and SharePoint.

Both technologies are viewed by Microsoft and industry experts as important drivers for IT purchases in the SMB market.

According to Microsoft technician Dave Priebe at distributor Ingram Micro, resellers like Goemmel are in step with the vendor when it comes to Unified Communications and Unified Messaging. “In order to continue to grow as a company, reseller organizations must be able to address the changing needs of their customers,” he says.

Unified Communications and Unified Messaging enable the information worker to achieve efficiencies in their workday. The technology platforms help users manage real-time communications such as instant messaging, VoIP, and Web conferencing, as well as near-line communications such as e-mail, fax, and voicemail through two tightly integrated aplications.

Groupware or group communication aplications such as Microsoft’s Unified Communications solutions, and document and content management aplications that include Microsoft’s SharePoint, are among the top-ranked aplications of interest to the SMB and mid-market in 2008, according to Ryan Brock, vice president SMB channels at AMI Partners Inc., a consultancy specializing in market intelligence and go-to-market strategy, based in New York.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers a collaborative infrastructure and tools to help users share assets across teams, departments, and organizations. Savvy Microsoft channel partners can also see that SharePoint goes beyond collaboration to offer customers new tools to better manage and share business content and intelligence.

“SharePoint is big these days for collaboration and portals, but there's more to it with services for indexing, search, as well as discovering important business data,” says Ergos’ Winter. SharePoint is another Microsoft product that enhances his company’s business solution practice, along with Outlook, .NET 3.0, and SQL technologies.

While AMI’s Brock notes that channel partners are increasing the numbers of solutions they’re bringing in-house at a fairly rapid pace, he cautions that VARs stick with what they know best. “If you’re a VAR looking to increase your portfolio, add a solution that’s close to your core competency,” he says.

And, do it with vendors who offer the right level of technical suport and competency programs, such as Microsoft. Why? Because in a recent AMI study more than half of SMBs queried said they were willing to pay more for an IT solution if it were coming from a VAR who understood the technology, their business, and industry.

Recognized as the fastest-growing business segment, the SMB market is ripe picking for Microsoft channel partners. Industry watchers expect continued double-digit spending on information technology with three out of four companies in this sector planning to increase employees and locations.

Channel partners looking to expand their Microsoft practice can facilitate that by focusing on core Microsoft competencies and embracing advanced technologies, such as Unified Communications, virtualization, .NET, SharePoint, Exchange, Live Services and hosted aplications, and endpoint security.

Ultimately, VARs who take the time to understand Microsoft’s roadmap and ecosystem will invariably be able to aply that knowledge to grow their own businesses.