As I was revisiting memory lane and thinking about my conversations with Carlos it became clear that all the insurmountable obstacles we had then were gone and the problems all remained the same. It became clear that I could do something to help our partners improve their quality of life and offer a new and better level of remote service and even enhance their business model to truly shift from a reseller-centric role into an MSP role. That day I decided I wanted to realize our dream and create a solution for resellers and technology partners. A few days later we founded IPTechView as a separate company to focus on building our new smart and secure remote access, remote monitoring, and management solution for resellers and MSPs.
IPTECHVIEW: Where did the Idea for Secure Remote Monitoring & Management for Technology Resellers Come From?
As a young entrepreneur in my late twenties, I was living in Barcelona, Spain, a metropolis then already with close to five million people. My first business was selling PC-based solutions to SMB customers as what today would be a cross between a Technology Reseller and an MSP (Managed Services Provider).
Not many companies had people that could understand networks and PCs then and all customer projects needed some support now and then. The biggest limiting factor was always the traffic to get from Point A to Point B to help customers. Sometimes it was about just rebooting equipment or changing a few characters in a configuration file. The intervention itself would take 10 minutes but getting to the customer and back could mean 2-3 hours in heavy, slow-moving, traffic-inhaling pollution.
This was before cellphones were a thing. Dial-up modems had just become usable. 9600 baud was a good average remote connection speed then.
Every trip out, my tech and copilot Carlos and I would be talking about how cool it would be if we could have a modem at every customer and connect with them automatically 24 times a day to make sure everything was OK and, in case of any trouble fix things remotely. We dreamed about a user interface that would show all of our customers and could provide a secure and reliable connection to every customer every time.
We even tried to build this ourselves, but dial-up modems were too unreliable then and often needed human assistance on the other end to get things going. It was also cost-prohibitive so no one wanted to pay for the dedicated equipment and phone line. We had the dream but the technology was not there.
Fast-forward 25 years later: The problems are still the same however the Internet has made connectivity ubiquitous and the Cloud, encryption, and VPNs make it possible to create a solution to manage every single customer and remotely access and manage every single device the reseller and integrators sell and to offer fast and impeccable service to the point of guaranteeing quasi mission-critical levels of service and redundancy for a very reasonable cost. My role had changed. Now I am managing a distribution company that sells to resellers and MSPs like me in my late twenties/early thirties. When talking to our customers I could see that even today they still had the same problems and providing a fast reliable service was still hard. One day, thinking about how it had been impossible to build my solution for resellers in the mid 80s it became clear to me that with today’s tools it was possible to build a great solution in the cloud.
