Future Success Strategies, Given Shifts in MSP Models
The pandemic accelerated technology, and MSP models. Here are strategies and what defines success in this new era.
December 21, 2021
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“For us, it’s specialization and subject matter expertise,” said Joseph Rabinowitz, co-founder and CTO, Homefield IT. “So moving away from generalization and just supporting anything to ‘we are a Microsoft shop’ or ‘we use Office 365’ or ‘we utilize this type of equipment.’ It’s all about specialization in making sure that when somebody is coming to you, as opposed to somebody else, the value add is the knowledge that we have.
“There is also risk associated with that, which I don’t hear discussed a lot. But I think it should be. Take Microsoft as an example. For us, we’ve got thousands of our clients using Microsoft licenses, whether it’s Office 365, Azure, etc. And say tomorrow, Microsoft decides to change some sort of policy, some sort of margin, whatever it is, we are completely at their mercy. So that is one of the things that’s very, very scary for a lot of MSPs out there. And I don’t hear enough about how to mitigate that risk.”
“We observe the same thing on the security side of the house as well,” said Paul Caiazzo, CISO and SVP of corporate development, Avertium. “We sought to reduce that concentration and dependency risk by looking at different platforms. So it’s probably easier for us to do that than it is for MSPs having to manage IT, but being able to monitor an environment via a variety of technologies.
“The second aspect of it, with Microsoft Azure, for example, we needed to expand so that we had first eyes on the bigger addressable market. But then also less dependency risk. So that’s been helpful to us. But that does bring challenges because you have to have that same sort of expertise to deliver the customer outcome regardless of what the technology standards are, and that requires a lot of investment in training and development.”
“For us, it’s to scale and onboard clients really rapidly,” said Stephen Moss, SVP and general manager, Connected Workforce, Insight. “The bigger challenges are size and scale of operation as being able to take a workload – whether it’s 500 users, 5,000 or 50,000 users — and assimilate them into the model very rapidly. Not only that, but make sure we give them the experience of the same size and scale as when we were much smaller.
“That will have to change for economic success, because we know other people are more agile. And if we’re not agile in terms of doing that, when you add the verticalization, that makes it even more complex. We know it will have to happen — it can no longer be IT generalist and cloud generalist and configurable services. We know that this is moving into a state where ‘no code’ work will be part of the MSP of the future. So those components are two of the bigger ways that Insight has changed for us, and will continue to.”
“There are some challenges that we’re facing in terms of success strategies,” said Homefield IT’s Rabinowitz. “So you could have multiple platforms — you could have Google G Suite in addition to Microsoft, or you could look at Oracle in relation to AWS or Azure.
“The problem is that it creates the need to have additional expertise, additional labor. And it’s very hard to find inefficiencies at scale, when you have to have all these different platforms that you’re able to support.”
“We’re at that point ourselves,” Caiazzo said, “where basically we’re saying we’re not going to take on any other other technologies until we can really get through what we’ve got on our plate now. Yes, we can address a pretty good sizable market now, and if we get even a small amount of market share, there’s not really a need for us to expand on other security products that we’ve got, even when customers ask us.
“We sometimes will have to say no — you have to get comfortable saying no. It’s not easy to do that, but the bottom line is that you must be good at what you do. You cannot do everything, so a measure of success for us is committing our resources to deliver outcomes based on focused expertise.”
“We’re at that point ourselves,” Caiazzo said, “where basically we’re saying we’re not going to take on any other other technologies until we can really get through what we’ve got on our plate now. Yes, we can address a pretty good sizable market now, and if we get even a small amount of market share, there’s not really a need for us to expand on other security products that we’ve got, even when customers ask us.
“We sometimes will have to say no — you have to get comfortable saying no. It’s not easy to do that, but the bottom line is that you must be good at what you do. You cannot do everything, so a measure of success for us is committing our resources to deliver outcomes based on focused expertise.”
During the last decade, MSPs have gone through profound technological changes. This phenomenon, in tandem with – you guessed it – the pandemic, has brought about significant business model transitions.
For providers, business model transformation stems from a number of sweeping technology changes. Nothing new there. Historically, MSPs handled a variety of predetermined tasks to support their clients, But this is no longer enough — not by a long shot. Since the pandemic, organizations now must really home in on how to leverage their MSP’s technical expertise as they prepare for the next stage in their digital transformation journey.
We know security and cloud have been the main growth drivers for most MSPs over the past few years. But it is no longer just about offerings. It’s about the attention you pay, specialization and expertise.
Avertium’s Paul Caiazzo
“You cannot do everything, so a measure of success for us is committing our resources to deliver outcomes based on focused expertise,” says Paul Caiazzo, CISO, SVP corporate development, Avertium.
At this fall’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo, we conducted roundtables with channel experts addressing hot topics in areas such as cybersecurity, cloud and MSPs.
The shifting MSP model, technological changes, and what success looks and will look like given that shift, were among hot topics addressed during our roundtable with industry experts.
Panelists included:
Paul Caiazzo, CISO, SVP Corporate Development, Avertium
Joseph Rabinowitz, Co-Founder and CTO, Homefield IT
Kurt Guenther, President, Business Solutions Group, Computer Services, Inc. (CSI)
Stephen Moss, SVP and GM, Connected Workforce, Insight
Scroll through our slideshow above for highlights from this roundtable.
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