My First RMM - and a Hint of What's to Come

My First RMM - and a Hint of What's to Come

- Lessons Learned, Episode 36

Just after the turn of the Century, we were introduced to a series of tools that took service automation to the next level. If you've been following the series, then you know that we were "rolling our own" for quite a while. As Windows got better, so did all the tools that helped us make it go.

Way back in the day, the term RMM - remote monitoring and management - didn't exist. We had monitoring tools, and automation tools, and all kinds of fun things. And just like today, every conversation started with, "What are you using for ...?"

Like many companies at the time, we were building and buying things in every combination we could think of. Some tools were just stupidly expensive. Those came from the enterprise space and had no idea that a small business would not pay $5,000 to buy a monitoring system for five users. Most companies were just feeling their way to see what they could charge.

We tried a handful of RMM tools. At the time, they pretty much all required that we have a dedicated machine on site or install their system on our domain controller. A few were true stand-alone systems. Others just relied on customized called to the operating system.

Oddly, one of the most successful systems required that it be installed on the domain controller, which was most likely an already-overworked 32-bit Small Business Server with 4GB or RAM. It "worked" mostly as a proof of concept. 

In my opinion, there was only one service truly ready for prime time circa 2003, and that was Kaseya. It required a dedicated server with a dedicated SQL server, and all the licensing, of course. That required a serious investment, but it absolutely delivered the goods.

Kaseya could do amazing things with scripting. And we dedicated a staff member to learning and mastering it. We ran it for four years, but by then we'd bought so many licenses that it was not worth the money to invest in a new server along with the SQL licenses. But during those years, it was truly awesome and never let us down.

Most of my "lessons learned" from our early Kaseya adventure had to do with the power of talking to, and listening to, other professionals. Many, many people were sucked into Kaseya's VERY high pressure sales pitch. They were sold 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 licenses when they had ZERO clients on managed services. The pitch was based on the promise that you'll be able to charge hundreds of dollars for each deployment.

Of course, you have to be a helluva sales person to sell 10,000 endpoints in a short time span. This is particularly difficult if you're selling into offices with 10-25 seats. And most IT service providers who were buying RMM tools had somehow managed to get ten or fifteen clients that size after ten years in business. So it was easy to see that they would never sell all those licenses. But they were now tied into payments that exceeded their mortgage.

Lesson learned: I bought 100 licenses, and paid a lot for them. And I bought 100 or even 250 at a time after that. But I never bought more licenses that I could sell in a short period of time.

That's also when I decided to commit to The ASCII Group. I joined ASCII because I was able to get preferred pricing on my Kaseya licenses. I still paid a lot, but I paid a lot less than I would have. The savings more than paid for my membership. We'll return to ASCII in a future post.

Lesson learned: Join associations that have proven value. Two good indicators are that people you respect are members, and they won't shut up about how much value they get. I became one of those members for ASCII.

Eventually, the competition to Kaseya became quite good. In fact, someone at the very highest level of Zenith Infotech (later Continuum) casually mentioned to me that great functionality in remote monitoring and reporting was going to be commoditized quickly and everyone would be able to do everything. That pretty much came true before we all jumped to the cloud about five years later.

Today, tools are pretty darn cheap, and deliver pretty much the same functionality as each other. Differentiation has mostly to do with the company who sells them and the service you get. I was an early adopter, and paid an extra premium for only buying what I needed. But it definitely got our business to the next stage of evolution.

Final lesson learned: Automation and tools can multiply your profit. When I bought into Kaseya, we had about fifteen servers under monthly maintenance contracts, and ten more on break/fix. I bought a hundred license, which allowed me to automate a great deal of the monthly maintenance on fifteen servers. And it allowed me to make a quick sale on maintenance agreements for the other ten. And then I had a bunch of licenses to sell to other folks.

So, on one hand, this is the kind of quick-win story Kaseya sales people were telling the masses. On the other hand, it proved my point about not over-buying licenses. There would have been no profit if I was paying for 975 unused licenses. We'll return to this conversation when we discuss my move to Zenith Infotech. Stay tuned.

What was YOUR first RMM experience? Was it profitable and good?

All comments welcome.

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Episode 36

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/p/lessons-learned-blog-series.html

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