Being adaptable is often an indicator of success. The more you can go with the flow, the more likely you are to find yourself in friendly waters.
This mindset seems to be the driving force behind GMS Live Expert. The outsourced help desk provider is partnering with Kaseya to link Kaseya’s network operations center (NOC) with GMS’s help desk support. The deal surfaced at this week's Kaseya Connect 2017 conference in Las Vegas.
GMS typically works behind the scenes in a non-disruptive way. The company provides support services to MSPs, while the MSPs retain their own brands with end-customers. As part of that work, GMS works with a range of technology companies.
“Kaseya is one that we're integrating with deeper,” says Daniel Goldstein, director of marketing at GMS. “Not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the services standpoint.”
GMS is RMM (remote monitoring and management) and PSA (professional service automation) agnostic, a fact the company holds as a point of pride. “We’re not forcing anyone to comply with our tools and policies,” says Goldstein. “The goal is to try and fit in as best we can with whatever they're doing and augment their abilities.”
A Little History
GMS launched 18 years ago by Goldstein’s father, Wayne. Daniel came on board seven years ago.
Before GMS, the elder Goldstein worked in training and operated a number of training facilities around Toronto, Ontario, Canada. From there, he got into e-learning support, telco support, and eventually MSP support.
“Funnily enough, he actually outsourced his support to begin with,” Goldstein says of his father. “He had a team in the Toronto area that worked on a contract basis. So he middle-manned the deal with one of the e-learning companies and realized there was a business there.”
The company has grown to 150 employees, 200 customers, and 100,000 end users. GMS is headquartered in Toronto and has offices in Eastern Canada, Quebec and other parts of Ontario.
They also have a small office in Buffalo, New York. (“One of our competitors went out of business and a bunch of people found themselves out of a job. So we went down, had a job fair and picked up a solid team down there out of that,” Goldstein says of the exemplary Canadian demonstration of good-neighborliness.)
The company began pushing its NOC offering early last year, hiring Danny Obaseki as director of business development.
Filling The Gap
Looking down the road, Goldstein says GMS is working hard on development. It's expanded its development team over the last few years and Goldstein says they’re currently working on mobile support as well as a branded desktop application.
“Basically the idea is to allow the partner to have better control over the customer experience with their own customers and to have GMS facilitate that,” he says.
According to Goldstein, filling the gap between what their partners communicate and what end users perceive remains an issue. “It's hard for MSPs to stay on top of everything because they wear so many hats and are spread thin in most cases,” he says. “So we want to give them the ability to more effectively communicate with their users.”
Competitive Landscape
No doubt, numerous companies offer NOC and help desk services to MSPs and VARs. Multiple models exist.
For instance, Continuum links its RMM and BDR (backup and disaster recovery) tools to its NOC and help desk services. The goal: Empower MSPs to hire more sales experts while outsourcing ongoing IT tasks.
NetEnrich, another player, has a slightly different model. That company works with a mix of VARs, MSPs and midmarket systems integrators to support complex IT environments -- everything from unified communications to security and Microsoft Azure workloads.
In GMS Live Expert's case, the company continues down on its relationships with MSP software providers.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
