MSP Association Launches at PC Expo

Announced yesterday at PC Expo, over a dozen companies have banded together to form the MSP Association with a focused goal of developing standards and best practices guidelines for the MSP market.

Management service providers deliver IT infrastructure management services over a network to multiple customers on a subscription basis, according to the group.

The 19 founding members of the MSP Association
are 2ndWave, Inc., Candle Corporation, Entuity, Inc., HP Openview, InteQ Corporation, sharp, Luminate, Manage.com, ManageIT, Inc., McAfee.com, NCMX, Inc., Nuclio Corporation, SilverBack Technologies, Inc., SiteLite, Inc., siteROCK Corporation, Storability, Inc., StorageNetworks, Inc., TriActive, Inc and UP 7/24.

ASP-News spoke with Dennis Callagy, senior vice president, operations, 2ndWave, about the company’s role as one of the founding members of the association.

“We are very excited about this,” he said. “It was amazing how quickly all involved recognized the opportunity in front of us. There was such a level of cooperation between the companies that the group quickly agreed on what the problem space within this market is.”

The founding members began meeting less than a month prior to yesterday’s announcement. According to Callagy, the association is still in the early customer adoption stage and has not yet set a timeframe for the association’s growth.

He added that the association wanted at least 12 members to launch, but far surpassed that with its ability to attract a core set of 19 founding members.

In related news, 2ndWave continues to build upon its partnerships (see related ASP-News story, 2ndWave to Deliver BMC Software Solutions, June 22nd, 2000).

ASP-News also had the opportunity to speak with Carolyn Ruech, vice president, marketing, InteQ.

Ruech explained that InteQ had talked a long time internally about forming something similar to the ASP Industry Consortium . “There has been a lot of conversations and socialization regarding this issue, so once it became more solid, there was a definite interest on our part,” she said.

“The founding members have worked very hard to get the mission and members in place,” Ruech said. “Next step is to develop our agenda around our goals-build the strategy and the action items around our mission.”

The mission of the MSP Association is to define and promote the management service provider market through education, research and definition of standards and best practices. To accomplish this, the association will serve as a forum for discussion of issues, sponsor industry research, develop open standards and guidelines and promote best practices.

“All the founders of the association recognize that we have a big education process in this market,” Ruech said. “And this association is a terrific way to help educate the market.”

It is evident that the MSP marketplace is emerging rather quickly, following suit of the ASP marketplace. But in order for this marketplace to continue a successful emergence, it must be clear to the industry and potential customers what exactly an MSP is.

“One of our goals is to really define what it means to be an MSP,” Ruech explained. “We need to be crystal clear about what an MSP is.”

Ruech also told ASP-News that Yash Shah, co-founder, president and chief technology officer, InteQ, will be the spokesperson on behalf of InteQ.

In the coming weeks, the association will hold its first meeting of founding members, elect officers, prioritize the group’s initiatives and form working committees.

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