On June 13, SkyKick held its Migration Suites Demo Day webinar. Two experts from Colorado-based MSP Digitech Computer Network Consultants (DCNC) – John Hardon, President, and Jordan Rein, Senior Systems Engineer and Project Lead – shared their approach to building a profitable Office 365 migrations practice. In–house technical expert, Joana Rocha, also gave a live demonstration of SkyKick’s Migration Suites.
5 key takeaways from the Migration Suites Demo Day webinar:
1. Partners that fully embrace a transformation to cloud services are getting the most from the Office 365 opportunity
Several years ago, DCNC initiated a transition from a more traditional break-and-fix model to managed services to stay ahead of the industry. Hardon observed:
“We noticed early on that customers were intrigued by the promise of cloud solutions but weren’t sure where to start. We knew that this new model would give us an opportunity to reach new customers. Like most in our industry, our first dabble into the cloud was with Office 365.”
2. Manual Migrations can be complex and time-consuming, creating risk to both customer satisfaction and profitability
For many SMB customers, migrations are their first step into the cloud. But migrations are often a technical and complex exercise with little predictability – and quickly sour a customer’s perception of what the cloud might offer them if their experience is poor. A migration can also balloon into a loss for MSPs if projects end up requiring more time or resources than anticipated. Hardon shared:
“On our first migration, we really had no idea what type of manpower and effort the project would take. We bid what we thought was a fair price that would cover our expenses and make us a nice profit. Unfortunately, we completely underestimated both the time involved and the cost. The project came in almost two weeks late and was well over budget.”
3. Find a vendor and tool to help standardize the migration process and improve the customer experience
Like many MSPs, John realized that they needed to adapt their approach after their first manual attempt didn’t deliver the results they were looking for.
“We needed to find a better way to get these projects done that would allow us to accelerate the process and make it seamless for our clients. We had two choices, find someone who had this process down and partner with them, or go through the expense of reinventing the wheel to come up with our own process.”
To evaluate the best vendor and tool for their business – DCNC found it helpful to identify some core criteria and engaged their senior engineers on a live call with the SkyKick team to ensure it met both their business and technical needs. John noted:
“Our criteria were simple – find a vendor that could provide an efficient migration with very minimal downtime and would be able to support our engineers as we learned their product.”
4. A migration project is much more than just syncing the data
There are many steps and tasks involved in completing a migration project – increasing the time/resources required and the risk of things going awry along the way. SkyKick helps solve this problem with an intelligent approach to automating the entire consulting project, which goes beyond the movement of server-side data. Though essential, moving the data is just one component of a migration project. Benefits of using an automation tool like SkyKick include:
- Standardization of internal processes
“We have built an easily repeatable project model that has all of the steps built in including content of client e-mail correspondence and very specific steps and timelines. It has reduced the project management time required significantly.”
- Project predictability
“We now know exactly what these projects are going to take. Our project management time is 4 to 6 hours maximum. By knowing exactly what we are going to spend on the project, it allows us to bill that as a flat fee.”
- Automated desktop readiness and reconfiguration
“We don’t have to go around to every user – whether it’s five, ten or a hundred – and re-create new Outlook profiles for their Office 365. SkyKick’s Outlook Assistant does this so well that most users honestly aren’t able to tell that their profiles switched.”
5. When you start right – migrations can unlock customers for a lifetime of cloud services
SkyKick’s Migration Suites has helped DCNC provide a delightful experience as they come into Office 365, while minimizing the operational burden on its staff.
“SkyKick has enabled us to go after migrations not only within our client base but with non-clients as well. We are confident that the clients will have a great experience and we will be able to execute the migration with relative ease.”
A great migration experience is also often the key to unlocking their customers for life.
“This has enabled us to successfully bundle other value-added services, such as Office 365 licensing, backup, e-mail security, encryption, etc. along with our migration services. This increases our monthly recurring revenue and supports a long-term relationship with these clients. In the end it allows us to provide the exceptional level of service that both our clients and we expect.”
Watch the webinar on-demand
If you’d like to view the full 30-minute webinar, it is available on-demand here. The webinar provides a 10-minute product demonstration of how to setup an Office 365 to Office 365 migration project using SkyKick’s SMB Migration Suites and a quick overview of the management dashboard.