Some MSP have spent upwards of $100 million in the last year just to get up and running, plus going for more rounds of VC just to break even on the operations center and being able to bring customers online. Charging between $7k and $12k a month for 24x7x365 coverage. On average in order to provision a customer correctly, assuming Murphy's law, it takes about 30 - 90days to get a customer online and tuned (as most MSP state) to eliminate false positives in the system and parse through the discard (mostly caused by printer jabber, HTTP video streaming, and other peculiar network type anomalies). Barring all that, in order to even break even on operational, other misc costs, and employee costs, an MSP is looking at a burn rate about $500k per month, so in order to break even at one is looking at close to 50 customers a month once an MSP is up and running. Anything less will probably upset the VC or the Angels one has borrowed from. Where the MSP service actually is cost effective is in companies like AT&T Worldnet, MCI, ISS, where the expenditure of the NOC has already been assumed by product sales and other customer revenue streams. So if you look at the MSP segment/companies in the last year with qualified personal, there isn't much selection out there, barring a few well-knowns calling the shots, but in the trenches it is a 1-2 year person with a little mix of Unix/NT knowledge, bad eyesight (due to squinting during their shift) and shreaks at sunlight. :) /m _______________________________________________ Firewalls mailing list Firewalls@lists.gnac.net http://lists.gnac.net/mailman/listinfo/firewalls