The ever-increasing economy of scale of the Cloud is driving the business computing world towards fewer, larger vendors offering massively scale-able public-cloud platform services, while at the same time also driving a trend towards tighter specialization of on-line applications (“Apps”) that work together to provide integrated business solutions.
The role of the MSP (Managed Service Provider) is evolving towards the following areas;
- Providing strategic advice and planning for business IT and communication requirements. Helping clients decide on what technologies, platforms and applications are best suited for their needs and which will work together in a coordinated, integrated solution set.
- Brokering Cloud services – aggregating solutions. Sourcing, acquiring, integrating and optimizing applications and services to build cohesive, well integrated and economic business solutions.
- Management, optimization and support of business applications, services and platforms; regardless of where they are located – public or private Cloud.
- More focus on business processes and the solutions required to support them.
- Recognizing new adjacent sales and service opportunities, in order to provide more value to clients and thereby maximize potential revenue per client. For example, many MSPs have recognized that the convergence of phones and computers means that MSPs can extend to providing VoIP, broadband and other traditional telco solutions to their clients – becoming a single point of supply and support – which is increasingly attractive to end-customers.
MSPs are well suited to the role of trusted adviser and solution aggregator, because they typically have a much closer relationship and understanding of their clients’ business processes than the larger telcos, application developers and public cloud providers.
The challenge to MSPs is to recognize and lock in these new recurring revenue services whilst maintaining their own brand & identity, gaining differentiation & competitive advantage – and also keeping their own business complexity down to a minimum.
This is where white-label, cloud billing systems such as Datagate, capable of billing numerous telco & utility services on a single MSP-branded invoice and end-user portal are ideal. The services, no-matter where they are sourced, appear together on the invoice and portal under the same MSP branding, thereby minimizing complexity and maximizing MSP brand exposure to the end-client.
MSPs that evolve and adapt to this new service-based, knowledge-based environment will be those that lead and win. Recognizing, locking in and monetizing new adjacent opportunities is key to this success.
Mark Loveys 
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