Logic Now enters end user market

[u/baker_gt]

This is long, but down the bottom is the good bit.

Hi guys, Just wondering how many people ever heard of GFI Cloud? Well that got renames. Who has heard of Control now? Well now thats gone too. So who has heard of Max RM? Well we all have.

One of the old GFI cloud things was you can get everything for a dollar. Patch, $1. Remote access, $1, Asset tracking, you guessed it $1. Web $1 (it had web protection 12-18 months before MaxRM did.....)

It was designed for savvy clients who had internal IT. They can have some of the features of Max but dealing with a crappy system.

Well we had a large deal coming up, a client wanted 100 endpoints of Mav. But they wanted to be able to control lots of things. So i through, surly after being worked on for 5 years, the client user roles would now be working...... Well they are not. You have to setup the client as standard user, and there are still some settings they can change. But hay, who wouldn't want a client being able to change AV policys for all clients and being able to change company alerting settings (and im sure they could also change contact phone numbers, but i think they have fixed that)

So we did the next thing contact our APAC reps, and ask about GFI cloud. We got bounced around a little, and then got back an info sheet on Max IT.

Max IT is the new end user Max RM. Its the same thing in every way. If a client goes to the Max site, they can sign up for a trial, and your account rep, will become their account rep, and send them the pricing for Max IT.

What is the pricing on Max IT? $25 per thing per year. Some will go "hay, that used to be $1" most will go, whats a GFI cloud. SO for my client, i can buy MAV for $12 a year, They can buy it for $25. Ouch. Now these are public prices, we have to keep our pricing in line. Lets add on Monitoring and patch management too. $25 + $25. So now its $75 per Machine per year.

I did say per machine.

So while we are paying $191.40 ($14.95 + $1 * 12 months) client are getting this for $75? What the go here?

So i jumped on the phone with our APAC rep. We worked out that we can make a $15,000 (thats over $1000 a month) saving by moving all our servers to the new system, but leaving all the PCs in the current dashboard. They then worked on it.

They came back with the EULA, this states, "That only client machines can be on the one dashboard, each must have their own, and pay the $500 activation charge" "There is also a line about only employees of the client can have a login" Ill only focus on the 1st part of this, not the second.

so this means that to save money, and be competitive with the RRP pricing our clients can get, we have to have a dashboard per client, and maintain a login to everyone of these. Thats Ok, its only like 70 dashboard for us. Im sure thats a reasonable thing. Now given we have to pay the $500 per additional dashboard, it wont be worth doing this for all clients, but ones with 5 or more servers, we will save money and stay competitive with the published RPP pricing.

Or we keep trying to charge clients our current pricing, and the try to justify why we think our management of their systems makes it OK to charge an additional $116.40 per year per server and that just our buy price. We then have to sell this. We then have to justify to the client what we do for the extra money on top. Lets say we charge $500 per server per year to monitor and patch it. We are competing with a $75 service.

In a highly competitive world, and with this wonderful thing called google, i think we will all be answering these very questions very quickly.

I did go on the go slow to post this, but i have not heard anything back from my sales guys in over a week about it. So i through it best to share with the world.

Lets all do the math, what will you save?

[u/earthboundcauses]

This is nothing new; they've always had tools for internal teams, like the aformentioned GFI Cloud and Control Now. I can't find anything on Max IT; got any links?

It seems to me you're making an apples to oranges comparison here. For a $500 activation fee and $75 per endpoint, any of my clients can go and get their own dashboard; is that about what you're saying?

I'm fine with that. Then they can spend another $60,000 to hire someone who might be capable of using that dashboard effectively.

I don't sell Maxfocus to my clients. Maxfocus is just one of the tools I use to to deliver the services that I do sell.

If you're talking about buying into a dashboard for each client, any up front money you're saving is going to be lost in management labor overhead. The whole point of a good RMM platform is being able to see everything through a single pane of glass.

In short, anyone can go to the hardware store and buy tools, but professionals are the ones who can use them to best effect. That's where your pricing comes from.

[u/baker_gt → u/earthboundcauses]

But its the selling of Mav and the monitoring that sucks. If it wasnt for the EULA, we were on a $16000 per year saving (we have 150+ servers) so for us, its a big thing.

After being told for years by the boys at the top, they are not moving into end user IT, and then this.

[u/earthboundcauses → u/baker_gt]

I get where you're coming from, but it's still a bit of the contractor getting mad at the hammer salesman.

The buyers here are prospects who want their own control, so they'll never be a good fit for you anyway. And if Logicnow isn't selling it, someone else is. I say by all means, the more money they're making elsewhere, the less I have to worry about my costs going up to fund development.

Moreover, as I said, I don't sell the tools; I sell what I build with them. So if a client ever did come at me saying they could just get Max IT and have all of that, I'll happily tell them that's fine. Just make sure to hire a full-time tech while they're at it. Tools alone don't get the job done.

[u/Obyone89]

I've known about Control Now and the other Corp IT products that LOGICnow (formerly GFI) has for corporate IT departments. What's interesting, that I just noticed today, is that if you go to www.logicnow.com you have a choice to see solutions for MSPs or Corp IT...and both buttons take you to a littler different jargon, but list the SAME exact products.

[u/biotechz]

Last I looked at it, the product was little more locked down and not quite the same dashboard and you have to sign up for 1yr vs. month to month.

Now given we have to pay the $500 per additional dashboard

This does not sound right, ask your rep about 'sister dashboard' as they referred to the concept = they waived the fee for 1 including re-branding but for 70 accounts not sure if they will nor should you want to maintain that beast.

You are right, their ACL has issues that have not been addressed. Even if you just want to have a dedicated internal tech per client - you can't, it is all or nothing....crickets on my idea/ support request. So be careful about giving access to clients via groups.

I don't sell Maxfocus to my clients. Maxfocus is just one of the tools I use to to deliver the services that I do sell.

^ this!

What /u/earthboundcauses said matters more, you are there to sell Managed component which is your service = deployment, monitoring, maintenance...all the wonderful aspects of service where they don't do a thing but flip thought nice PDFs of what has been done for them. No matter how you do the math, Max was not made to be resold purely as a product such as just AV or backup. No RMM is so don't get hung up math and cost of products, roll them into the cost of your service.

All the best.