Dave Cunningham, Alvaka’s Business Technology Officer, was recently interviewed by Channel Partner Insight regarding Alvaka’s narrowing focus on it’s Patch Management as a Service offering. Below is an excerpt from the article. See link below to read full article.
As many MSPs continue to expand their offerings, Alvaka Networks in Irvine, CA, is seeking to narrow its offering in an effort to appeal to its main client base.
Alvaka’s business technology officer, Dave Cunningham, told CPI in an interview that the MSP is being “very selective” about adding to its solution set as it seeks to grow revenue by 25 percent in 2019.
“We are somewhat unusual in that I would say that 90 percent of MSPs are expanding their solution set, whereas we are probably [getting] more and more narrow, more focused, partially because we are pursuing a larger-than-average client size than most MSPs,” Cunningham said.
Alvaka Networks caters for mid-market to small enterprise customers, meaning businesses of between 500 and 5,000 employees, which Cunningham notes is a different market to many MSPs. As such, the firm is only adding to its solution set in a very conservative manner. Along with this, Cunningham pointed out that only offerings that existing staff can deliver, that clients are asking for and that are complementary to existing offerings will be added.
In a further effort to differentiate itself Alvaka offers patch management as-a-service, which, according to Cunningham, lends itself well to the MSP’s customer base as it’s an area where larger organizations struggle.
“Large organizations really struggle to patch their environment and supply all the security updates, so that’s something that is ideally outsourced to a company like ours,” he said.
Cunningham notes that this is an area that offers Alvaka the opportunity to partner with MSSPs who may not have the resources to be able to do patch management themselves.“What we are seeing is that the MSSP, while they are doing vulnerability management, they don’t have the staff or the skills to be able to do the patch management, which is a remediation task…
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.