A little over a year after adopting a new name signaling broader ambitions, MSP360 is steadily approaching its goal of becoming the industry’s latest provider of integrated solutions for managed service providers.
Formerly called CloudBerry Lab and mostly known for backup products, the company signaled its twin intentions to specialize in software for MSPs and offer a multi-faceted suite of such systems last August when it unveiled its new brand. Since then MSP360 has been quietly readying itself to reveal the exact contents of that new product family.
The latest milestone in the journey took place some three weeks ago, when the company introduced MSP360 Managed Remote Desktop, a new remote endpoint control solution. Additional systems are coming soon, according to Brian Helwig, MSP360’s CEO.
“Over the next six months or so we will be releasing a new product suite,” he says, adding that the mission for that launch will be nothing less than positioning MSP360 as “the number one MSP platform on the planet.”
Without offering specifics, Helwig hints that the affordability and flexibility of MSP360’s current products will be core elements of the forthcoming suite’s value proposition. The Managed Remote Desktop product, for example, features a pricing scheme based on the maximum number of concurrent sessions users need to conduct rather than the number of endpoints they support.
Each session costs $5 per month, or will when MSP360 starts billing for them—the product is available free “most likely until the end of the year, and for sure for at least the next 90 days,” Helwig says. Subscribers can add or drop sessions from their account any time they wish, moreover.
“There’s no contract,” Helwig notes.
The same goes for MSP360’s backup solution, which unlike many such systems doesn’t charge storage fees. Users pay a minimum $27 per month for their first five protected endpoints, and buy cloud storage separately from one of more than 40 third-party providers, a policy that eliminates vendor lock-in risks.
“We don’t hold your data hostage,” Helwig says.
Coming within weeks to that product is a new unified billing option that will allow users to pay both their MSP360 licensing fees and external storage fees through one invoice. Wasabi will be the first storage partner included in the program, with Amazon Web Services to follow shortly.
The backup and remote desktop products are both available stand-alone, but share a common management interface when run together. Users can attach their own brand to the remote desktop product, which also lets technicians transfer active sessions to another administrator or share a session with them.
MSP360’s new partner enablement resource, called MSP University and previewed to ChannelPro in February, also debuted this month. Provided free of charge both to partners and non-partners, the system includes technical content on MSP360 products and topics like storage and security, as well as business growth and management training.
“Our goal is to provide the 101[-level] material that gets new MSP’s off the ground and gives existing MSP some new ideas,” Helwig says.
MSP University is likely to play a role in the partner program MSP360 plans to introduce in the future. The closest equivalent to such an offering the company has at present is a volume-based licensing model.
“We don’t really have a gold, bronze, silver, if you want to call it that, or bronze, silver, gold kind of program. It’s just the more you consume, the more cost-effective it gets,” Helwig says.
That policy may be a contributing factor in the growth MSP360’s backup solution is recording. Active users of that system are up 22% in the last 12 months, and endpoints protected have increased by 11%. Helwig says the company signs over 400 new MSP partners per quarter.
To accommodate those rising numbers, MSP360 has doubled its U.S.-based technical support team in the last nine months, and staffed up its salesforce as well. According to Helwig, both groups continue to hire.
MSP360 isn’t the only vendor moving past roots as a provider of one solution toward a future as a provider of many closely integrated systems, like industry heavyweights ConnectWise, Datto, Kaseya, and SolarWinds MSP. RMM vendor NinjaRMM, for example, recently introduced data protection software and announced plans to roll out a more extensive product suite.
