Joe P. over at MSP Mentor always does a nice job covering MSP trends in detail and this article is no exception. Joe spent some significant time at Mindshift digging into their strategy with Next Desktop and has a good conversation taking place on his site here.
Also of interest in the comments on the site is the following from Vicki Brown at MindShift talking about their private label strategy.
“BTW, we’re currently working on a Private Label program for VARs, MSPs, ISPs, and Hosters who can resell the new Hosted Desktop service — under their name and brand. This private labeling enables resellers to offer this as a service from them; the mindSHIFT and NextDesktop brands are invisible to the customer.”
My question is do you consider MindShift a channel partner or a competitor and how will they be able to overcome the channel seeing them that way.
I sit on the fence in terms of their Next Desktop solution. They have done such a nice job branding it and making it simple that it seems only natural that we would private label it as an MSP and provide it to customers. But at the same time I have two questions that will need to be put to rest:
- Is there a demand for the service out there? How will the small business rationalize purchasing computers to connect to the hosted desktops in the sky?
- How does MindShift plan on handling competitive situations? Say a prospect is in the vetting process and it comes down to two vendors, us and them, what do they do?
I am interested to hear your thoughts on this as well so don’t be shy to leave comments here or shoot me an email as always: jclifford@everonit.com
Josh
