BOSTON, MA and KANSAS CITY, MO--(Marketwired - Apr 16, 2013) - Continuum, a leading provider of managed services solutions, and Growth Achievement Partners (GAP), a major provider of sales and operational consulting in the office technology marketplace, announced today their strategic alliance to establish a new Managed Services Business Model specifically for office technology dealerships. The model provides a blueprint for a seamless transition into this adjacent opportunity, so dealers can capitalize on lucrative trends toward off-site management, HaaS (hardware as a service) and cloud-based offerings. This transition will help deliver recurring revenues and customer growth to dealers through an expanded solutions and network services offering, resulting in accelerated financial performance.
Continuum is a Diamond Partner at the ITEX National Conference April 17 - 18 in Las Vegas, at which Growth Achievement Partners will conduct a hands-on workshop introducing the new Managed Services Model. Both Continuum and GAP will provide support for dealers adopting the new model through additional educational opportunities, such as ongoing managed services workshops hosted by GAP through the Business Technology Association (BTA).
As a long-tenured consulting services provider in the office equipment arena, GAP has been the leading company in helping dealers successfully move into the Managed Services space. According to Forrester Research, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) spend among small to medium-sized businesses is forecasted to be $406 billion in the U.S. by 2013, representing a considerable opportunity for office technology dealers. A paradigm shift toward managed services could optimize financial performance for dealers, who can build incremental revenues by offering cost-effective, secure, off-premises management to their existing customers, in addition to proliferating new business through this new platform.
Continuum is widely recognized as the leading provider of IT management software and services for MSPs with partners managing more than half a million devices across nearly 40,000 businesses. GAP has joined forces with Continuum to leverage this expertise, which complements its own experience in strategy, operations, sales and marketing. Through this powerful partnership, these companies are uniquely qualified to establish a new Managed Services Business Model specifically designed to accelerate dealers' success in an MSP environment.
"The office technology market is in transition, and dealers who accelerate through the turn will thrive," said Chris Ryne, a principal at Growth Achievement Partners. "Our model provides benchmarks similar to the traditional industry model that has been the standard for highly successful dealers."
The new Managed Services Model provides demonstrated key metrics that dealers can follow to create a successful and sustainable managed services practice, including:
- Revenue: The appropriate targets, mixes and types, and how those should change over time
- Contracts and Account Expansion: Seats under management, revenue per seat and growth expectations via additional products and services
- Activity and Pipeline: Sales cycle duration, pipeline metrics and activity targets to achieve business model revenue targets
- Head Count: Productivity measures for sales and vCIO personnel, target head-count levels based on seats managed and customers under contract, and the personnel mix between sales and operations
- Compensation: Who to pay, how to pay and when to pay, as well as target compensation levels as they relate to gross profit and revenue
- Profitability: Target contribution level and operational levers to enhance performance
"We partnered with Continuum to combine their operational, time-tested business analytics with the successful work we have done with clients to jointly assist dealers in taking full advantage of this tremendous market opportunity," added Mitch Morgan, a principal at Growth Achievement Partners. "Continuum has a depth of experience no other provider can match, which lends invaluable insight our dealers can leverage to benefit from a profitable managed services client base, focused on high-margin, ongoing service level agreements and per-seat licensing."
"Managed services deployments offer incredible revenue growth profit potential for dealers, and such architectures are truly the future of a converged office technology marketplace," said Michael George, CEO of Continuum. "This new initiative with GAP provides technology, services, and guidance that dealers need to penetrate the rich managed services opportunities within their existing customer base and capture new accounts by offering well-differentiated services within the office technology marketplace."
The Managed Services Business Model will be distributed at the ITEX National Conference session entitled "Catapult Your Profits with Unified Managed IT and Cloud Services" on Thursday April 18, 2013. The document can also be downloaded at www.growthachievementpartners.com or www.continuum.net/businessmodel. Companies that wish to participate and benefit in the ongoing development of the model will have the ability to subscribe and access the fully complete Business Model, which will include the current statistics. Subscribers will obtain an updated report on a quarterly basis, and a quarterly subscriber briefing will be conducted to provide detailed analysis for each model update. A subscription registration can be obtained at www.growthachievementpartners.com.
About Continuum
Continuum provides a leading SaaS-based managed services platform that managed services providers (MSPs) use to efficiently backup, monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain desktops, servers and other endpoints for small-and-medium-sized businesses. The comprehensive platform provides an intelligent remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution and an advanced backup and disaster recovery (BDR) offering -- all integrated with an industry-leading network operations center (NOC) and U.S.- based world-class Service Desk, delivering a single, unified managed services experience. The company currently employs more than 650 professionals worldwide, supports over 3,300 MSPs, and monitors more than a half a million endpoints. Continuum has also formed a non-profit foundation, called Continuum Veterans Foundation (www.hire-our-heroes.org), which was established to provide financial support to local and national charities that focus on helping our veterans find jobs. The principal owner of Continuum is Summit Partners (www.summitpartners.com), a Boston-based growth equity firm that has raised more than $15 billion in assets. For more information, please visit www.continuum.net.
About Growth Achievement Partners
Growth Achievement Partners is the recognized leader in providing strategic sales and operational consulting within both the traditional and emerging markets to growth-oriented companies throughout the country. The company is helping progressive dealerships take advantage of the changing market landscape by speeding the transition into an effective hybrid model, capable of sustained growth and reoccurring revenue within the four key areas of Core, Solutions, Network Services, and Growth Achievement.
Contact Information:
For more information, contact:
Lynette Bohanan
CommCentric Solutions Inc.
813-727-0196