TUC Managed IT Solutions Ltd., an MSP with headquarters in Ottawa, Ont., and customers across North America, has created a partner program directed at other solution and service providers.
Introduced last week, the new program lets channel pros outsource level 1 and 2 help desk calls to TUC’s experienced, high-capacity support team.
“The service desk is nothing new,” says Marco La Vecchia (pictured), TUC’s vice president of sales. “It’s just very difficult to do.” The TUC partner program allows solution providers without a help desk to avoid the costly and time-consuming process of building one and enables companies that do have a help desk to provide after-hours support or add overflow resources during busy periods.
La Vecchia sees the new offering as a fit mostly for IT providers that sell hardware and project work to businesses at the upper end of the SMB scale and wish to collect recurring services revenue as well.
“This allows them to open up the door to another conversation and really kind of try and establish themselves as a trusted adviser with some of their clients,” he says, adding that smaller channel partners looking to move upmarket into bigger accounts could find TUC’s program equally attractive.
Partners pay no fee to join the TUC program and collect a portion of TUC’s monthly service fees. That cut varies but is typically within the range of 10 to 15 percent, La Vecchia says. Partners can bill clients themselves for help desk services or have TUC handle that task for them. Either way, La Vecchia emphasizes, partners remain completely in command of their accounts.
“The service provider will always hold the relationship with the client,” he says.
In addition to help desk services, TUC also offers outsourced infrastructure monitoring and access to the company’s self-serve customer support portal. Partners can deliver all of those offerings to their clients on a white-label basis and negotiate response time commitments on a customer-by-customer basis.
“What’s wonderful about our program is that we customize each SLA based on what the customer’s needs are,” says La Vecchia, who hopes to recruit about 100 partners by the end of this year.
TUC’s partner program is the latest manifestation of an ongoing effort to expand the company’s revenue base. In February, it merged with CareWorx Inc., which sells hardware, cloud solutions, and services to assisted living facilities and other senior care providers. That move, in turn, came just weeks after La Vecchia, who has stints at both AVG Technologies and SolarWinds N-able on his resume, assumed his current role. The new partner program, he says, reflects insights into MSP needs and desires gleaned from thousands of conversations over his more than 15 years in the channel.
“At the end of the day if I can help a bunch of people in the channel generate some nice recurring revenue streams that they didn’t necessarily have or think about bringing into their business, then I’m all for it,” he says.
