2012 Outlook Concerning Cloud, MSPs

By Alex Osipov, CTO, OS33

What do MSPs need to do to take their practices to the next level as they mature and as cloud pushes in?

"Own the office" or last mile can definitely be an opportunity to grow services with existing clients. This can be done by focusing on offering the solutions the customer needs and will use at a competitive price. How you go about growth really depends on your customer's industry and their size. Smaller clients can be won over by offering a breadth of services provided by a single vendor, the MSP. These types of clients cannot afford to spend time and resources on managing multiple relationships and any MSP that can meet their needs across a variety of services will be able to win that business. For the larger clients, the depth of those services is where each MSP will differentiate and this is where vertical expertise will be required.

Vertical expertise and specialization will be required long term, and as cloud pushes in, MSPs will need the ability to deliver multiple cloud products as one integrated solution. Email and some of your customers' IT may already be in the cloud, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You will start to see a lot more use of cloud services for line-of-business problems. Data and application mobility are the new reality and major opportunities exist to help the workforce go mobile. As well, hardware refreshes will force many companies to rethink their existing investments, so make sure you can deliver a sustainable cloud solution that makes sense in the long term.