Some MSP have spent upwards of $100 million in the last year just to get up
and running, plus going for more rounds of VC just to break even on the
operations center and being able to bring customers online. Charging
between $7k and $12k a month for 24x7x365 coverage. On average in order to
provision a customer correctly, assuming Murphy's law, it takes about 30 -
90days to get a customer online and tuned (as most MSP state) to eliminate
false positives in the system and parse through the discard (mostly caused
by printer jabber, HTTP video streaming, and other peculiar network type
anomalies). Barring all that, in order to even break even on operational,
other misc costs, and employee costs, an MSP is looking at a burn rate
about $500k per month, so in order to break even at one is looking at close
to 50 customers a month once an MSP is up and running. Anything less will
probably upset the VC or the Angels one has borrowed from. Where the MSP
service actually is cost effective is in companies like AT&T Worldnet, MCI,
ISS, where the expenditure of the NOC has already been assumed by product
sales and other customer revenue streams. So if you look at the MSP
segment/companies in the last year with qualified personal, there isn't
much selection out there, barring a few well-knowns calling the shots, but
in the trenches it is a 1-2 year person with a little mix of Unix/NT
knowledge, bad eyesight (due to squinting during their shift) and shreaks
at sunlight. :)
/m
_______________________________________________
Firewalls mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.gnac.net/mailman/listinfo/firewalls
