Meet Virtua’s Excuse Eraser for Managing Macs

A recently introduced white-label service aims to making supporting Apple hardware easy for MSPs who don’t have Apple management skills but do want Apple management fees.

You certainly can, per a separate post, spend a lot of time mastering the arcana of a brand new field evolving rapidly in real time. But why bother when there’s an easier way to burnish customer loyalty and expand your top line? Heck, if you’re reading this on your phone you might be holding the modest little goldmine I’m referring to in your hand right now.

I’m talking about Apple device management. To be sure, managing endpoints is about as commoditized a service as an MSP can offer, but as long as businesses still use endpoints and endpoints still experience downtime and security breaches, businesses are going to need someone to manage their devices, and if it can’t be in-house IT it’ll be an MSP instead.

Yet, according to Justin Esgar, CEO of New York City-based Apple support and solution specialist Virtua Computers, most MSPs studiously blinder themselves to the existence of Macs, iPhones, and iPads in the environments they’re responsible for.

“The PC MSPs just don’t want to talk about it or deal with it,” says Esgar (pictured), noting that one reason he knows this to be the case is how often an MSP calls him in to manage the five Macs in a 100-endpoint office they support.

“They’re leaving money on the table,” Esgar observes. Or worse yet, he adds, subtracting money from their top and bottom lines.

“They’re harming their relationship with their customers,” says Esgar, an Apple Premium Technical Partner with 18 years of experience who also co-hosts the reliably excellent All Things MSP podcast. “To say, ‘We don’t do that because it’s a Mac or an iPhone or an iPad,’ is a really damaging line for an MSP to say to a customer. So they’re either going to lose money straight up by not supporting it, or they’re going to lose the customer and then lose money.”

Maybe a lot of money at that. Apple products currently account for 12.6% of global desktop/laptop market share (23.9% in the U.S.), according to StatCounter, and 21% of global smartphone share, according to IDC. The numbers are even higher in specific verticals, Esgar notes.

“Doctors use iPhones. Truck drivers use iPads. Those devices need proper management,” he says. “These MSPs are often ignoring 10 to 30 percent of a client’s fleet because it’s Apple.”

He knows why they’re not supporting all that hardware, too. “They don’t know how. They don’t have the bandwidth to learn.” And besides, no one needs to worry about Apple devices anyway, right?

“They’re fed a lot of information from Apple like Macs are secure, so it should just be fine, but it’s not,” Esgar says.

Indeed, turns out security incidents involving Apple devices really are a thing. And while software for mitigating that thing is available from Microsoft, via Intune, Jamf, and Addigy, among others, deploying a tool doesn’t necessarily close an MSP’s Apple management skills gap.

That realization is a big part of the thought process that led Esgar to envision an outsourced Apple management service for MSPs that don’t have Apple skills, don’t use Apple tools, don’t wish to change either fact, but do wish to manage Apple devices and make money doing so. Called VirtuaCare, the service provides either white-label or sub-agent Apple management support on a 24/7 basis. You keep the relationship, we handle the Apple stuff, Esgar says.

Partners pay by the hour rather than monthly subscription fees. “We don’t want to lock you into a per-client, per-device thing,” Esgar says. “We know PC MSPs have a lot of clients, and maybe this person has two Macs and that client’s got four iPads, or whatever.”

Partners can buy hours at $200 apiece in five-, 10-, 15-, or 20-hour blocks. The more hours you buy, the more ancillary benefits (like Slack channel access and monthly strategy calls) you get, and the shorter your guaranteed response time.

From Esgar’s perspective, though, VirtuaCare’s most significant ROI, which you get no matter how many hours you buy, is the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing the job you aspire to do for all of your clients all of the time.

“If you’re a PC MSP and the customer says, ‘Jim’s computer isn’t connecting to the network,’ you would never say, ‘We don’t do firewalls.’ That’s not a thing we do as MSPs, right? We want to make sure the whole thing works,” Esgar says. “PC MSPs, Mac MSPs, we need to just start being MSPs.”