Recent industry headlines suggest that the outlook for MSPs has begun to brighten. At HyAlto, we contend it wasn’t that murky to begin with – the challenge is having in place the automation tools and processes to take advantage of how the world has changed with the pandemic.

Last month, global technology research and advisory firm Information Services Group (ISG) reported that annual contract value for managed services deals worth more than US$5 million reached $7.2 billion in Q4 2020, hitting pre-pandemic levels. Larger enterprises are turning to MSPs as they provision more IT services. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) revenues were up 32 per cent, to a record $6.5 billion.

It was against this backdrop that our CEO, Alan Zurakowski, recently spoke with Charles Weaver, CEO and Co-Founder of MSPAlliance. Over the past 20 years, MSPAlliance has become the unified and vendor-neutral voice of the managed services industry. HyAlto is proud to have partnered with MSPAlliance for 2021, to share our insights with MSPAlliance’s 30,000 members.

For MSPAlliance’s MSP Zone Podcast, Alan and Charles discussed “4 Process Improvements for Private Cloud Managed Services.”

Considering that the majority of MSPs serve small to medium-sized businesses, with perhaps one or two larger enterprise clients, how can they scale up to be in that weight class documented in the ISG report? Become a multi-tenant, multi-cloud service provider.

In this Podcast episode, Alan and Charles break it down into four areas:

• Automate the back-office workflow: VMware lacks an easy, out-of-the-box toolset to meter service usage and feed the billing system. Many MSPs still rely on manual spreadsheets. In a multi-tenant environment where the MSP must accurately track service usage for VMware services, as well as all other services used by each client (backup, disaster recovery, security and so on), these outdated back-office processes need to go.
• Offer a self-service portal: This need for automation extends to the front office, so that customers can easily provision what they require and helpdesk techs are freed from the 80 per cent of tasks that occupy their time but could easily be automated.
• Automate service fulfillment: Again, automating the majority of tasks that are simple and straightforward, so that an MSP’s techs can focus more of their time on high-value activities – high value for the client, and for the MSP to grow its business.
• Offer flexible pricing and resource consumption: MSPs must break free of a traditional model of “set it and forget it,” with fixed multi-year contracts that are not responsive to clients’ changing needs and that miss out on opportunities to upsell and deliver more value. In a multi-cloud world dominated by hyperscale public cloud providers, MSPs must be able to offer the same a la carte flexibility with their private cloud service offerings.

Alan and Charles explored these and many other points related to how MSPs can compete and thrive in a post-COVID world. Check out the full MSP Zone Podcast at MSPAlliance.