Equus Offers Online Backup with Intronis

Minnesota-based system builder Equus Managed Services Solutions is launching a new managed services offering for channel partners at the Autotask Community Live event in partnership with Autotask.

Equus, a 22 year old employee-owned company, makes hardware private label equipment, is Intel’s seventh largest customer in the U.S., and may be the largest U.S. based system builder. But this is their first foray into the managed services space.

“What’s new here is a complete service based offering,” said Frank Gurnee, Vice President of Managed Services at Equus.

The new Equus offering includes several highly rated services offerings, including Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) by Level Platforms, Help Desk by Live Virtual Help Desk, Backup Solutions by Intronis and Symform, Hosted Email Security/Compliance by Reflexion and Exchange Defender, E-marketing solutions by Kutenda and Varvid, and NOC services. But the key to the whole package — and the reason why a system builder would get into the managed services market in the first place — is a Hardware-as-a-Service offering.

“Hardware as a service is the most differentiated part of this,” Gurnee said. “There are very few people out there doing HaaS, providing servers, new desktops, licensing, all at a low monthly fee.”

Gurnee said that while they are well aware there are a multitude of managed services for resellers to choose from, they believe they have some major advantages in putting together c complete offering that lets partners make choices about what to offer from a balanced menu without having to research many different solutions.

“We’ve created an a la carte experience where they can easily research any of these offerings, to create or complement what they want to do,” Gurnee said.

Gurnee said the offering also makes it easy to put configurations together. It provides channel partners with a web e-commerce portal that allows easy configuration of servers, desktops, notebooks, infrastructure items, services, and peripherals in a user cart type experience. This lets managed service resellers configure all aspects of the systems from RAM to Hard drives, to total custom configurations. All configurations are displayed with a monthly price, suggested retail price and recurring revenue profit. This advantage gives users the ability to see the profit potential of their entire service offering to their clients.

Gurnee said their offering has absolutely no minimum requirements and no up front costs for the equipment. They expect it will appeal both to traditional resellers just getting into managed services as well as to established MSPs.

“For the established guys, the big get for them is the hardware-as-a-service part,” he said.