Featured Article: The Price Of Success

By Gennifer Biggs, Business Solutions magazine.

One hitch in the widespread deployment of cloud or hosted IT solutions by MSPs has been concern about the role of IT providers when it comes to the cloud. Let's be honest, MSPs are worried about how they bring in revenue if solutions are provided through the cloud and hosted off-premises rather than via on-premises hardware and software. Fair enough, right? A big part of that trepidation revolves around how to price those services and solutions in a way that reflects the labor needed to manage that IT environment. One MSP caught between evolving technology and making a profit finally decided to take action. Next Level Café tackled the complex issue by adopting a new pricing model, moving from standard service level agreements (SLAs) based on computing power to SLAs based on headcount pricing.