TECHNOLOGY SERVICE NEWS
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 According to Network World magazine, Everdream and SilverBack (NSI Business Partners) are among a handful of managed service providers that not only survived the dot.com boom and bust, but have also managed to thrive.Here's what Network World had to say:  Among the survivors, Everdream is the one that had to change the least. Founded in 1998, Everdream got $50 million in venture funding in 2000 and another $20 million in 2005. It has done more than survive over the past few years, but not without making a few changes.Lyndon Rive, co-founder and vice president of Everdream, says as soon as the company abandoned being a hardware, software and services provider, its business benefited. "Our full-service offering that addressed the entire life cycle of the PC required a greenfield environment, which meant we had to replace existing hardware, and that didn't work," Rive explains. "Now we are hardware-independent and customers can subscribe to just the services they want, with a flexible licensing model, which puts a lot of them at ease with going with an MSP." For example, Everdream used to enforce a three-year contract. Now customers can sign on for just one year, which Rive says can cut down a budget's line item from $10,000 to close to $3,000. "It takes the long-term, big-budget commitment down for the customer. It removes a barrier," he says. With the exception of a few services, Everdream places agents on the machines to be managed. The agents send outbound-only communications to Everdream's data center, and from there customers can choose to have Everdream staff manage their desktop environment or to manage it themselves with Everdream's technology in a hosted-application model. Rive also attributes the company's approximately 250 customers to the nature of desktop management. "It's such a mundane task that doesn't add any competitive advantage to a company that it's perfect for managed services," Rive says.  When Dan Phillips became CEO of SilverBack Technologies in 2001, he saw the opportunity to adapt its management-software platform into simply software and sell it to other aspiring MSPs. Phillips, who joined SilverBack from management-software maker Concord Communications (now part of CA), says he found SilverBack's core expertise was delivering software, not services. Now SilverBack, which brought in about $38 million in four rounds of venture funding by April 2003, sells its IT network- and security-management software platform to emerging MSPs."We got our costs and expenses down early enough to get through some difficult years in the market," Phillips says. "It took years for us to make the transition, but it was a better market approach to become a software company and enable other companies like systems integrators, VARs and MSPs to use our software to deliver their managed services." With four years of 85% growth year-over-year, Phillips credits the company's 70% customer renewal rate with recent successes. SilverBack doesn't sell its software and run; it works with its 105 partners, or customers, to develop their MSP delivery processes. Phillips dubs this a franchise model and says SilverBack helps each company change its business model to that of an MSP, building pricing models, contracts and even marketing materials. SilverBack developed its own management-software platform that covers network- and application-monitoring and security-management tasks. Part of its selling point, Phillips says, is that the software supports an architecture that can work on a one-to-many basis, because service providers manage multiple customer networks. The company competes with BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM Tivoli. Phillips says SilverBack is working to integrate its offerings further with complementary services from companies such as Everdream to win customer dollars from traditional management vendors. "There is an entire ecosystem of managed services that are complementary to our software and can be easily integrated into an overall managed services offering," he says. |