Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IT is not a technology cost, it’s a human resource cost! This is a fundamental concept MSPs need to keep in mind when they are looking at their businesses, but one many smaller MSPs tend to overlook. Think about it; for every business you’re supporting as an MSP, you’re doing so to ensure their IT infrastructure has stability of operation and is optimized to maximize staff productivity.

These are interesting – and challenging – times to be a Managed Service Provider. When it first published its Managed Services Market Size Forecast, Mordor Intelligence valued the market at US$152 billion in 2020, and predicted it to reach US$274 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 11.2%. Over a year later, following a pandemic which has changed the way most of us work and which will probably see permanent changes going forward, Mordor is sticking by its prediction.

Lemons, oranges, grapefruits, limes… We know that they are not the same, but if necessary, you can make juice with all of them. And yes, we can and we will. We are in summer and it makes you want to make a good cocktail, doesn’t it? Today, in PFMS blog, we are going to analyze the commonalities of N-Able (Solarwinds MSP), Kaseya and Pandora FMS. Also their -remarkable- differences of course.

From my previous blog, I’m going to continue the list of five things you can do to improve your technical service delivery to your customers (if you didn’t read the last post, you can catch up on what you missed here (link)). In the following three points, I focus on the role automation can play.

If you attended our recent virtual Empower event you may have seen the extensive session on mergers and acquisitions. We’ve witnessed a large amount of M&A activity within the MSP space over the past few years as a result of the managed services business model becoming attractive for private equity investment. According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, M&A activity was at an all-time low in 2020, except within the technology sector.

Many managed services providers (MSPs) depend on word-of-mouth referrals to generate new customers and grow their business. And while relying on these can work to a degree—especially if your company provides outstanding customer service—it isn’t an ideal strategy if you want to really scale or grow. There are several serious downsides to relying solely on these types of referrals.

In around 2003 I worked as a level one tech for a very large customer contact center (1,500 call center agents) for a major American hardware vendor. This was around the height of adware and other greyware hitting Windows XP.

We’ve seen a number of MSPs hesitant to dive into using Microsoft Intune for their customers. One reason for this is that it may require them to encourage customers toward Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which, at an additional cost per seat, may seem like a tall order for a client for a 30-person team. It’s also a new discipline for many technicians, and often requires they find time to hone their skills while tackling existing tickets throughout a normal day.