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In 2010, Tom Burtzlaff founded CMIT of Columbia. Over the years, Burtzlaff and his team built up the business to more than 50 managed services clients with a 97 percent customer retention rate. Earlier this year, the company was sold within the CMIT Solutions system, and Burtzlaff stayed on as an area coordinator representative, assisting the franchise’s eight locations in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. “If done correctly, the MSP sales model is sticky,” says Burtzlaff. “Barracuda MSP has become our trusted advisor over the years, and that enables us to be our customers’ trusted advisor.”

A standardized solution for regulated industries

As a comprehensive IT solution provider, CMIT of Columbia handles customer challenges ranging from internet outages to server crashes and data breaches. In a move to standardize its business operations, the MSP decided to migrate all its customers’ email systems to Office 365. With customers in regulated industries such as accounting, healthcare, and legal, Burtzlaff knew that additional data protection was needed.

To help fully protect customers from advanced threats, Tom bundled Barracuda Essentials for Email Security with every Office 365 license they sold. This gave customers spam filtering, compliance archiving and cloud-to-cloud backup.

Minimal investment helps deliver a better customer experience

After seeing the positive results of using Essentials for Email Security, CMIT of Columbia includes it in every sale without exception — and sometimes for free. “Our tech team receives fewer support calls, and our time is freed up to service more customers,” says Burtzlaff. “Rather than argue with a customer about why they should pay a few more dollars a month for this added protection, we’ll include it for free. The cost is minimal, and it helps us deliver a better customer experience, which is a critical factor in building a recurring revenue business. I like working with Barracuda. They’ve always been good at keeping us up to date with what’s next in security, and they’ve been an excellent partner.”

A partnership with high quality support

Burtzlaff recalls a standout moment involving Barracuda and one of the MSP’s customers. “A few years ago, I received an email from a client at 2:30 a.m. saying, ‘Thank you for recovering our data!’ The client suffered a server failure, and Barracuda’s Intronis Backup service and after-hours support automatically took care of the problem and recovered their data. After an experience like that, the customer sees us as heroes. We thoroughly enjoy those moments, but we also know that it’s our partners like Barracuda who deserve much of the credit.”

To learn more about our email security portfolio, visit our Barracuda Essentials page.

To learn how other Partners are improving their businesses, check out Barracuda MSP’s collection of Success Stories.

Want to save this success story for easy reference and sharing? Download the PDF.

Photo: Web Hosting / Unsplash.com.


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Lindsay Faria

Posted by Lindsay Faria

As Director of MSP Marketing, Americas, at Barracuda, Lindsay Faria is dedicated to empowering Barracuda MSP partners to grow their businesses by providing tools and information to make marketing and selling their data protection services as effective, fast and easy as possible.

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