Nerdio has added white labeling to its streaming IT-as-a-service solution for SMBs.
Available immediately, the new, no-charge deployment option lets MSPs attach their own name, logo, color scheme, and other brand elements to Nerdio’s end-to-end SMB technology package, which combines virtual servers and desktops with collaboration, productivity, BDR, security, and administration tools.
“If a partner would like to make our service look as if it were theirs alone, they’ll be able to do that,” says Paul Guerin, executive vice president of sales and business development at Nerdio, which is headquartered in Chicago. Larger MSPs with well-known brands have been especially eager for that feature.
“This is very much just responding to a requirement, and in some cases a very important requirement, for some of our channel partners,” Guerin says. “It can be a deal breaker.”
White labeling functionality available to Nerdio partners extends to the solution’s two-factor authentication and help desk messages. MSPs who let customers perform simple functions like password resets themselves can brand Nerdio’s administration portal as well.
Nerdio was originally developed by Adar Inc., a Chicago-based MSP, for its own use. Since last year, the solution has been available to MSPs as a resellable, all-inclusive, and entirely online SMB technology environment. The system can be hosted in Nerdio’s private cloud or, since June of this year, the Microsoft Azure public cloud.
At present, Nerdio has about 50 MSP partners. That figure is on track to rise 312 percent in 2017 though, according to Guerin. Though Nerdio sells directly to some customers, most of which are legacy Adar clients concentrated in the Greater Chicago region, it is rapidly shifting towards a channel-first sales model.
“I’m expecting by the end of the year, at least two-thirds of the new business we did this year will have come from partners,” Guerin says.
Nerdio is among several solutions vying to become the surrogate of choice among channel pros for Small Business Server, the once popular network-in-a-box solution that Microsoft retired in 2012. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, for example, has been selling an end-to-end hybrid cloud solution featuring its own compute, storage, and networking hardware and virtualization and cloud management software from Zynstra Ltd. since April of 2016.
More recently, Tech Data Corp. introduced a solution that includes virtual machines hosted in the Microsoft Azure public cloud and Microsoft Office 365 licenses, as well as backup, storage, and VPN features and optional remote desktop functionality. In July, at Microsoft’s Inspire partner conference, the distributor announced plans to integrate that product with the then brand new Microsoft 365 suite.
Nerdio launched a partner program in December of last year.
