Continuum - Review
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TL:DR - Most of the functionality comes from using Log Me In. - There is no scope of service for their NOC technicians, lots of grey area on who does what. A huge amount of complaints from current users of the platform (even on their internal social media) very dismissive/corporate replies as well.
Now, this could easily change in a year or 2. The future of MSPs is that there will be a number of large scale providers and the smaller guys will go, It's not a question of if but when. So although Continuum have a long way to go, they and other providers are going to get there.
Let's start with the offer
You can get access to hundreds of technicians and become a managed services provider, you get to leverage their economies of scale, their time spent tuning and setting up systems, a whole host of benefits.
You pay for what you use, per device There is no on-boarding fee or device minimums but they do have a strict (which I like) process of training and on-boarding so you get the most out of the product and you don't have a bad experience of it.
You receive a fully white labeled service, from the agents you install to the US based technicians who answer the phone in your company name. So you are not just getting RMM or tooling, you also get the man-power.
Sales & Marketing
I had 2 excellent sales reps in the Continuum team. Really nice guys who were part of the process.
Marketing on the other hand...the single biggest reason I avoided Continuum was their marketing team for a whole host of reasons. Marketing lets the sales guys down in a big way.
Looking at the RMM app.
Almost everything that the RMM agent does, it does through data that Log Me In captures. So much of the cost goes towards the license for that.
The first machine I installed it on (A Windows 10 I5 with SSD system) it locked up the system and crashed it. This is a clean system that I use and it caused a fair bit of worry, took about 4 restarts before the system was back to normal.
The RMM app itself does not register in the portal for a good 2-4 hours for a new device. This is worrying because if you task an engineer to a customer site and want to deploy the agent to all their devices in an hour, you won't know whether it has worked or not. Every other RMM agent syncs with the console in about 10-15 minutes.
The installer and the agent software is full of Continuum branding & marketing. The listing in add remove programs screams "We are Continuum" so you don't get a true white label experience.
Compared with other RMM apps, there are better tools out there which you can use, Comodo One is free and it sadly does a much better job but most of the cost of the RMM app seems to go towards Log Me In rather than their own developed app.
Looking at the NOC technicians
There are lots of promises made about what the NOC guys can and will do but there is nothing written down or credible about where they involvement stops and yours begins. So it sets them up to be shunting off as much of the work as they can onto you.
Has this happened? Yes.
They have an internal social media platform which you get access to upon joining and out of everyone on that site, the consensus was, the NOC guys pass the buck as much as they can and you spend a lot of your time either micro-managing them or having to do the work yourself.
The biggest promise of Continuum is that you get access to that man-power but without a clearly defined scope or agreement, I can see this will continue to happen in the future.
Patching service
As part of the service, they offer a patching service where they will screen and filter the Microsoft updates for you, sounds great in principle.
The problem? A huge number of essential security updates are blocked by default and a lot of the stability updates are blocked as well.
The user interface
It's a very dated interface. Lots of things hidden away in menus. A lot of things which should be quick and easy are just a chore to set up and manage.
Alerting and reporting as for example, if you want to set alerts and reports, you have to do it per day of the week for each hour but this is a maze of drop down menus and it's a very tedious process, a more modern interface could let me draw hours of time for an entire week quickly but instead I have to use the drop downs per day Mon-Sun. Then I have to do this again for another site.
This kind of stuff seems trivial but it really slows you down if you have a large network of sites, so for growing and scaling, it needs to be put right.
Finally
There is no single product or service which will let you become an MSP. This is a fantasy and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Continuum might improve a lot of this in the future but for now, Don't use.
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Thank this is the first honest review I have seen of them.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Continuum - Review:
Patching service
As part of the service, they offer a patching service where they will screen and filter the Microsoft updates for you, sounds great in principle.
The problem? A huge number of essential security updates are blocked by default and a lot of the stability updates are blocked as well.
So what happens when one of their customers is compromised by something one of those blocked security patches would have fixed? This seems like a HUGE problem to me. Of course I'm guessing they are looking for ways to spend the least amount of time fixing things, but isn't fixing things what you pay them for?
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@Dashrender said in Continuum - Review:
@Breffni-Potter said in Continuum - Review:
Patching service
As part of the service, they offer a patching service where they will screen and filter the Microsoft updates for you, sounds great in principle.
The problem? A huge number of essential security updates are blocked by default and a lot of the stability updates are blocked as well.
So what happens when one of their customers is compromised by something one of those blocked security patches would have fixed? This seems like a HUGE problem to me. Of course I'm guessing they are looking for ways to spend the least amount of time fixing things, but isn't fixing things what you pay them for?
Hence the problem with anything flat rate.... the goal of one party (the buyer) is to get as much work as possible done for that money. But the goal of the other party (the seller) is to get as little done as possible. Flat rates can be good, but you have that fundamental hurdle to get over before it will work.
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@Dashrender said
I'm guessing they are looking for ways to spend the least amount of time fixing things, but isn't fixing things what you pay them for?
Pretty much why the Continuum model falls down.
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That's why companies like us (NTG) consistently get clients because this kind of thing fails. We do not bill flat rate though (at least not for the first 60-90 days). Flat rate hurts both sides most of the time.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Continuum - Review:
@Dashrender said
I'm guessing they are looking for ways to spend the least amount of time fixing things, but isn't fixing things what you pay them for?
Pretty much why the Continuum model falls down.
For customers... works great for the vendor.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/4v23up/continuum_breach/
When it rains....
