Live: Level Platforms' Road Show Hits Town

By Gennifer Biggs, storage, security, and managed services editor

The Level Platforms road show crew welcomed nearly 60 prospective and current partners at the Columbus stop of it month-long juggernaut of a partner event. The remote monitoring and management software vendor has rolled out three teams to 18 cities across the country to talk to partners about Managed Workplace 2011, offering tips from both the vendor's team and its beta users, who spent much of last year working with the new release and building best practices around the completely overhauled tool. Joining LPI on the road are several integration partners, including eFolder, StorageCraft, Autotask, Symantec, Watchguard, CA Technologies, and Intronis.

Dan Wensley, VP of partner development and marketing, Level Platforms, welcomed the crowd and set the tone by outlining the day's three goals — education, collaboration, and integration. "There is a clear theme here, it's about collaboration," says Wensley. "Our integration with the bigger vendor community has helped us spur growth in the adoption of managed services with our partners."

Part of the message from LPI was a look at the evolution of IT industry in the past 20 years – from double-digit margins on hardware to the VAR era, from solutions providers to managed services. "Managed services was a significant evolution both in terms of the IT industry and in terms of a business model," says Wensley, adding that today, there is a new technology impacting the channel and its business model — cloud.

Addressing Level Platforms' cloud strategy was LPI CEO Peter Sandiford via video. He outlines a close relationship with Microsoft, including that vendor's challenge to its partners that, "If you are not on the cloud, you may not be a Microsoft partner." Overall, Sandiford reassured the partners in attendance that cloud will bring new opportunity, and is just another step in the evolution outlined by Wensley. "When you move customers to the cloud, the points of failure will grow — even for a solution as simple as email in the cloud — and that means opportunity for you," says Sandiford. "How do you make money in the cloud? Easy. Just keep doing what you're doing. Setup and configuration, migration projects for on-premise to cloud, proactive monitoring, alerting, and remediation – just what you do today."

Listen to Editor Gennifer Biggs and Level Platform VP Dan Wensley chat about the 18-city Level Platforms Managed Workplace 2011 road shows.