A moving landscape for MSPs

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) will demonstrate a preference towards platform solutions - whether it's a security platform, endpoint security platform, backup platform or an all-in-one IT and security platform. Vendor fatigue is real and MSPs are looking to converge their spend with as few vendors as possible to drive profitability and improve efficiency. Vendors have begun to respond to this expectation with offerings anywhere from a pricing bundle to a full platform offering everything in-between. Vendors are looking to partnerships to deliver to this expectation – however, pricing bundles and packages based on partnerships are likely to fall short of expectations of delivering a truly integrated platform experience - from onboarding and invoicing to support and workflow automations.

MSPs will seek to gain workflow efficiencies and lower their costs and hence drive profitability through automation. They will rely on vendors to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver this automation and will want to market AI-driven services to their customers to differentiate themselves. AI-driven automation from vendors will largely be focused on service delivery optimisation. The vendors most likely to succeed are the ones that have a platform with access to telemetry and technician behaviour across the wide swath of tools to best leverage AI to identify and optimise their workflows. MSPs will continue to have to invest in automation to maximise the benefits.

MSPs will demand a much better customer experience across sales, onboarding, post-sales support and billing. Vendors, big and small, have largely failed to meet customer expectations on these fronts. MSPs will prioritise customer experience over best-of-breed functionality when determining which vendor to consolidate their spend with.

Enterprise-grade service providers looking to move down market to the SMB segment will continue to experience pricing pressure and reduced margins in the SMB segment while having to compete with Microsoft at the same time for those SMBs willing to spend top dollar for an all-in Microsoft service. Recent outage and security events with Crowdstrike and Veeam will cast doubt on the notion - "You can't get fired for deploying Crowdstrike or Veeam."