Want to Avoid an Endless Race to the Bottom? Here’s How

By Charles Cooper 1

Nearly any discussion of contemporary channel trends includes a lament that dates back to the era when 20 megabyte floppy disks were considered state of the art. To wit: How do you offset shrinking profit margins?

Nothing new under the sun here. Profit erosion is an inevitable by-product of commodity competition. And it has been part of the tech scene  – especially on the hardware side – since the first PCs rolled off the assembly lines. There’s little point in building a business around keeping hardware up and running – not when the cloud’s self-service on-demand provisioning promise is being realized.

But while you can’t make a living by only focusing on hardware any longer, another part of the value chain is thriving.

With a growing number of companies moving their traditional IT infrastructures to hybrid cloud environments, managed service providers can comfort themselves knowing that customers will continue to pay a premium for professionals with the right expertise to chart this migration.

As one long-time observer of the MSP scene noted, the only way to truly combat commoditization in this business is to keep moving upstream. No two clients will have the exact same needs, but hybrid cloud computing’s advent puts the MSP into an enviable position in this new technology era. 

Keep the following in mind:

Underwritten by VMware